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With  Mitchell  Kennorley' t  compliments 


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THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 


BY 

GEORGE  D.  HERRON 


NEW  YORK 
MITCHELL  KENNERLEY 

1917 


G'ih  of  the  President 
svn  2  0*17 


0 


THE  MENACE  OP  PEACE 


AS  deviously  and  vastly  as  Germany  pre- 
^  pared  for  war,  so  deviously  and  vastly  is 

^  she  now  preparing  for  peace.  The  same  pes- 
tilential espionage,  so  repulsive  yet  pervasive 
and  prevailing;  the  same  loathsome  perfection 
of  forgery,  falsehood,  and  intrigue;  the  same 
stark  insensibility  to  the  usual  decencies,  the 

j"^  common  nobilities,  of  the  game  of  life;  the 
same  shameless  rejoicing  in  every  form  of 
human  infidelity  and  dishonour:  these,  with 
added  modes  and  messengers  polluting,  are 
now  co-ordinated  in  a  ramified  propaganda  for 
a  peace  that  shall  leave  Germany  relatively  un- 
defeated, if  not  obviously  victorious.  And 
with  these,  in  muddling  and  mindless  array, 
march  the  publicists   and  the  pacifists  who 


6  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

would  have  it  that  the  sources  and  issues  of  the 
war  are  too  obscure  for  intellectual  judgment 
or  spiritual  discernment.  They  clamour  for  a 
peace  that  shall  leave  the  causes  unknown,  the 
embattled  questions  unanswered — even  by  a 
conflict  that  is  destroying  our  present  civiliza- 
tion, and  joining  the  flower  of  Europe's  man- 
hood to  them  we  call  the  dead.  We  hear  it 
said,  on  every  hand,  that  it  does  not  matter 
which  side  wins  so  far  as  the  human  future  is 
concerned.  We  must  treat  the  war  as  if  it 
were  really  about  nothing  at  all;  as  if  it  were 
but  the  rage  of  competing  peoples,  and  to  be 
ended  with  neither  victory  nor  defeat  accruing 
to  the  one  or  the  other  group  of  competitors. 
This  has  been  typically  expressed  by  Professor 
Irving  Fisher,  of  Yale  University,  in  a  recent 
number  of  the  New  York  Independent,  To 
his  eyes  "the  one  ray  of  hope  out  of  the  dark- 
ness is  that  this  war  may,  because  of  the  inlier- 
ent  forces  at  work,  necessarily  end  in  a  draw." 
*'As  soon  as  it  becomes  a  settled  judgment  of 
the  world  that  nothing  can  be  gained  and  much 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  7 

lost  by  continuing  the  war,  the  time  will  have 
arrived  to  conclude  it  and  to  get  at  the  task  of 
ending  war  in  general."  We  are  substantially- 
asked  to  conclude  that  the  most  stupendous  con- 
flict of  history,  unalterably  charged  with  the 
world's  destiny,  means  nothing  that  is  discov- 
erable and  we  are  to  make  its  lack  of  meaning 
a  reason  for  peace.  If  this  be  true,  then  of 
course  it  matters  not  who  the  victors  are,  nor 
when  the  war  ends;  nor  does  anything  matter 
that  man  has  to  do  with,  and  his  destiny  is  of 
no  concern. 


II 

jyUT  it  is  not  true.  It  matters  infinitely 
-^-^  which  side  shall  win,  and  what  shall  he 
the  vision  and  the  judgment  of  man  as  to  the 
issues  involved  in  the  war.  And  the  thing  that 
urges  and  counts  is,  not  when  the  war  shall 
end,  hut  what  it  shall  he  seen  to  mean.  For 
the  war  to  close,  and  the  world  not  know  what 
it  has  heen  fighting  ahout,  would  he  the  su- 
preme catastrophe  of  history,  Terrihle  as  the 
war  is,  the  peace  which  the  pacifists  propose 
would  he  more  terrible,  A  compromise  he- 
tween  the  contending  helligerents  would  he  a 
hetrayal  of  the  peoples  of  every  nation,  and 
would  issue  in  universal  mental  and  moral  con- 
fusion. A  peace  that  leaves  the  nations  where 
they  were,  that  recognizes  neither  victor  nor 
vanquished,  that  ignores  the  conflict's  causes 
and  questions,  that  evades  all  judgment  as  to 

8 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  9 

the  right  or  wrong  of  the  matter — such  a 
peace  would  be  the  last  disaster  of  mankind. 
The  millions  who  have  died  would  have  died 
in  vain.  The  lessons  of  the  last  two  thousand 
years  would  have  been  written  in  the  sands. 
The  hard  ascent  of  the  race,  from  its  beginning 
until  now,  would  have  conveyed  no  convoking 
and  uniting  purpose,  no  empowering  and  com- 
pelling prospect.  The  judgment  day  would 
have  come  and  gone  without  our  discerning  the 
judgment  passed  upon  us,  or  even  knowing  we 
had  been  judged.  The  supreme  opportunity 
of  man  would  have  proved  itself  greater  than 
man. 

As  one  who  hopes  passionately  for  the  vic- 
tory of  the  Allies,  I  would  say  that  a  complete 
Prussian  triumph  would  be  preferable  to  a 
compromise  between  the  contending  peoples 
and  principles.  For  even  under  the  baleful 
bondage  of  a  German  dominion  mankind 
might  still,  through  high  rebelhon,  through 
hard  suffering,  awaken  to  its  mission  in  the 
universe — to  cosmic  intimacy  and  to  infinite 


10  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

choice.  But  if  the  war  end  in  universal  eva- 
sion, if  the  race  refuse  its  hour  of  great  de- 
cision, then  downward,  into  long  and  impene- 
trable darkness,  we  shall  surely  go.  One  can 
imagine  such  an  issue  as  the  very  despair  of 
the  heart  of  God,  vainly  broken  for  a  dastard 
and  derelict  humanity. 

Yet  it  is  for  a  peace  based  upon  just  such 
an  evasion  that  the  pacifists  are  working — and 
working,  however  unconsciously,  as  the  serv- 
ants of  the  Prussian  military  purpose  and 
power.  They  prate  of  pity :  but  they  know  not 
the  moral  content  of  the  pity  that  is  true  and 
triumphant.  They  babble  of  brotherly  love: 
but  they  see  not  that  the  love  that  is  creative 
and  redemptive  hath  flame  and  granite  and 
steel  among  its  elements.  The  true  lovers  of 
man  are  the  relentless  haters  of  lies;  and  they 
have  blood  in  their  veins,  and  bones  in  their 
bodies,  and  weapons  in  their  hands.  It  is  not 
love,  but  the  lack  of  love,  the  lack  of  spiritual 
brain  and  nerve,  that  evades  judgment,  avoids 
justice,  and  seeks  compromise.     And  the  com- 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  11 

promise  the  pacifist  plotters  propose  would  not 
be  peace,  but  perpetual  war.  There  is  no 
peace  without  justice,  no  justice  without  truth, 
and  no  truth  that  is  not  the  achievement  of  the 
love  that  takes  sides  and  conquers — ^takes  sides 
passionately  and  conquers  definitely.  Peace 
and  justice  are  the  same,  and  so  are  love  and 
fraternity  and  ti^uth,  and  also  freedom  and 
faith.  They  are  but  different  names  for  the 
Power  that  holds  the  balance  of  the  world. 

These  are  the  times  in  which  to  read,  regard- 
less of  one's  behefs,  the  Apocalypse  of  the 
apostle  who  saw  the  wrath  of  the  Lamb  con- 
suming the  kingdom  and  systems  that  were 
completing  their  cycle  under  the  exhausting 
rule  of  Rome.  There  is  no  better  tonic  for  a 
wearied  and  baffled  goodwill;  no  stronger 
solace  for  the  hearts  that  have  hoped  for  social 
liberation  and  international  fraternity,  and  that 
now  beat  low  amid  the  shadows  of  divine  dis- 
appointment. Here,  in  this  Book  of  the  Wars 
of  the  Christ,  the  symbol  of  the  ultimate  peace 
is  the  lake  of  glass  mingled  with  fire.     It  is  the 


12  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

peace  that,  burning  with  an  unresting,  infinite 
ardour,  prevails  at  the  end  of  love's  conquest  of 
truth,  love's  achievement  of  justice.  It  is  the 
peace  of  the  Power  we  are  created  to  know  and 
to  become  intimate  with,  first  as  families  and 
individuals,  then  as  nations  and  societies,  and 
at  last  as  a  wedded  race.  And  it  is  the  peace 
whose  beginnings  this  unimaginable  war  is 
divinely  meant  to  precipitate. 


Ill 

AND  what  is  the  war  about?  There  are 
answers,  enough  and  to  spare,  that  deal 
with  phases  of  the  conflict.  It  is  a  renewal, 
the  historians  tell  us,  of  the  ever-recurring  col- 
lision of  rival  racial  movements :  there  is  an  in- 
cidental truth  in  the  answer,  but  nothing  more. 
There  are  voices  declaring  the  source  of  the 
struggle  to  be  in  the  mutual  jealousies  of  Ger- 
man and  Anglo-Saxon,  each  seeking  to  pre- 
vent the  predominance  of  the  other:  and  this, 
too,  is  true  in  part.  The  Radicals  expose  and 
denounce  the  financial  causes  of  the  conflict: 
and  they  are  nearer  the  truth  than  the  others. 
For  it  is  true  that  Governments,  the  decisions 
of  rulers  and  ministers  and  parliaments,  are  in 
the  hands  of  one  or  another  of  great  banking 
groups.  In  their  hands  is  practically  all  of 
the  world's  industrial  activity,  and  the  making 

13 


14«  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

of  peace  or  war.  The  back-doors  between  the 
money-marts  of  London  and  Paris  and  Berlin, 
between  those  of  Berlin  and  Rome  and  Vienna, 
are  always  open :  the  messengers  of  the  profit- 
makers  go  in  and  out  the  reeking  portals. 
Probably  two  hundred  men  control  the  war's 
resources;  and  they  will  have  a  mortgage  on 
the  world  when  the  war  is  done.  Let  us  admit 
the  whole  ghastly  truth:  the  war  that  now  en- 
gages the  nations  has  its  setting  and  sustenance 
in  a  financial  avidity  and  rottenness  that  are 
beyond  the  common  mind's  measure. 

Even  so,  the  economic  interpretation  of  the 
war  is  but  superficially  true.  If  man  were 
merely  a  mechanism,  the  explanation  might  be 
sufficient.  But  man  is  more  than  a  mechanism ; 
and  the  action  of  the  mechanism  itself  is  merely 
an  expression  of  man's  spiritual  quality,  of 
the  degree  of  his  self-realization.  Economic 
modes  and  social  forms,  and  the  industrial  and 
national  conflicts  they  engender,  are  but  ob- 
jectifications  of  man's  inner  mind  and  manner. 

This  is  especially  true  of  the  capitalist  sys- 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  15 

tern  of  production.  Capitalism  is  not  a  thing 
in  itself:  it  is  but  the  manifestation  of  a  thing: 
it  is  a  revelation  of  both  the  social  and  the 
average  individual  thought  or  desire.  Capital- 
ism is  a  state  of  mind:  when  brotherhood  in- 
forms the  social  and  the  average  mind,  then 
brotherhood  will  organize  the  world's  produc- 
tion and  distribution,  and  the  capital  therein 
engaged  will  be  social  and  sacramental. 

We  must  look  beneath  our  economic  modes 
and  strifes  for  the  meaning  of  the  war — for 
even  so  much  of  the  meaning  as  man  may  read 
and  apply.  The  war  may  indeed  have  spiritual 
sources  beyond  our  present  ken.  Of  the 
cosmic  tides  that  beat  upon  the  world  we  know 
nearly  nothing.  Pragmatically  speaking,  this 
convulsion  of  the  nations  may  be  but  an  in- 
cident of  some  struggle  that  involves  the  stars 
and  the  spaces — an  eddy  in  the  course  of  a 
strife  too  vast  for  our  caged  and  planetary  com- 
prehension. But,  historically  speaking,  we 
may  find  this  war — perhaps  all  wars — ^to  be  but 
the  conflict  between  two  rival  principles  of  col- 


16  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

lective  life  and  conduct.  History  is  the  dis- 
closure of  this  conflict — the  record,  tortuous 
and  treacherous,  of  the  slow  and  hard  struggle 
between  the  autocratic  and  the  democratic 
principles  for  the  direction  of  the  human  climb. 

Or,  to  put  it  otherwise,  our  history  is  decid- 
ing whether  the  will  that  proceeds  from  mutual 
love,  from  an  affection  that  is  collective  and 
fraternal,  or  the  will  of  sheer  mechanic  might, 
shall  be  the  power  that  finally  and  commonly 
prevails.  Shall  the  will  to  love,  or  shall  the 
will  to  power,  be  the  chosen  law  of  human  rela- 
tions—of all  our  collective  and  individual  pro- 
cedure? Shall  the  peoples  be  governed  by  a 
power  imposed  upon  them  by  a  master-might 
or  a  master-class,  justifying  itself  by  the 
strength  of  its  right  hand?  Or  shall  they  co- 
operate with  a  power  that  springs  from  a  Di- 
vine Presence  within,  co-ordinating  them  in  a 
common  growth,  in  equal  opportunity,  in  social 
goodness  and  spiritual  gladness  ? 

Not  all  the  prophets  and  teachers,  not  all 
reformers  and  saviours,  have  trusted  the  demo- 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  17 

cratic  or  fraternizing  principle;  not  all  have 
prepared  its  way.  Such  as  the  Buddha  and 
the  Christ  have  worked  with  it.  So  have  the 
mystics  of  the  time  of  the  Germanica  Theo- 
logica.  Rousseau  and  Lamennais  and  Maz- 
zini,  the  English  Wycliff,  the  Swiss  Zwingli, 
the  American  Lincoln,  have  all  striven  to  create 
power  within  men  rather  than  to  exercise 
power  over  them.  Not  far  from  these  are 
Aurelius,  Epictetus,  and  the  later  Stoics. 
These  all  dreamed  the  dream,  each  within  the 
circle  of  his  own  experience,  his  time,  and  his 
philosophy,  of  the  divinely  self-governing  in- 
dividual, of  the  mutualistic  society.  On  the 
other  and  opposing  side,  following  the  auto- 
cratic principle,  are  such  as  the  Csesars  and  the 
not  wholly  blind  Napoleon,  the  great  Hilde- 
brand  and  the  stern  Cromwell,  even  the  Savon- 
arolas  and  Luthers.  Here  the  whole  govern- 
mental and  papal  conception  of  society  en- 
camps. On  this  foundation  rose  the  Bis- 
marckian  State,  and  even  what  is  known  as 
German  social  democracy.     These  all  essayed 


18  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

to  make  people  good,  or  orderly,  or  co-opera- 
tive by  authority.  They  have  identified  their 
conceptions  of  human  relations  with  an  ex- 
ternal political  or  hierarchical  might. 


IV 

THE  supreme  expression  of  the  will  to 
love,  of  the  power  that  springs  from  an 
inner  and  common  Divine  Presence,  is  in  Him 
we  call  the  Christ.  But  the  Christian  spring- 
time was  brief,  and  the  winter  of  the  world  has 
been  long.  For  a  little  while,  among  won- 
drous and  willing  communities  of  martyrs,  His 
law  of  love  seemed  to  prevail.  Earth  seemed 
on  the  threshold  of  the  just  and  joyous  society. 
But  soon  was  He  hidden  from  men  by  the 
rulers  and  the  priests,  and  His  idea  has  had 
few  and  vagrant  voices  and  manifestations. 
Institutions  and  tyrannies  have  arisen  in  His 
name  since  His  words  shook  Jerusalem  and  the 
Galilean  hills,  but  they  have  been  the  negation 
of  all  He  taught  and  promised.  And  now,  in 
the  collapse  of  our  fabled  Christian  civiliza- 
tion, are  writers  and  reformers  proclaiming  the 

19 


20  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

failure  of  the  idea  for  which  Jesus  stood. 
Were  they  not  as  moles  that  burrow  in  the 
earth,  they  would  discern  that  the  world's  col- 
lapse is  precisely  due  to  His  rejection — to  the 
rejection  of  the  principle  which  Jesus  believed 
to  be  the  only  practicable  basis  for  social  secur- 
ity, for  individual  sanity.  Our  civilization  is 
J  f alUng  in  upon  itself,  like  a  falsely  constructed 
building,  because  it  is  based  upon  the  will  to 
power  instead  of  upon  the  will  to  love.  For 
the  basal  brotherhood  of  human  relations,  the 
universal  democracy  of  love,  these  are  no  more 
mere  sentiments  than  gravitation  is  a  mere  sen- 
timent— no  more  than  the  movements  of  the 
tides  or  the  highways  of  the  stars  are  senti- 
ments. 

For  love  is  the  eternal  and  inviolable  consti- 
tution of  our  being.  What  builds  not  upon 
love  and  according  to  the  order  and  freedom 
that  are  love's  correlatives,  builds  always  for 
ultimate  disaster  and  death.  Above  the  pres- 
ence and  the  power  of  this  love  we  have  no 
choice :  our  choice  is  limited  to  accepting  or  re- 


THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE  21 

jecting  it.  We  may  obey  it — and  the  world 
shall  become  the  kingdom  of  heaven.  We  may 
reject  it — and  the  world  shall  be  ground  to 
powder.  The  wreck  and  welter  we  now  be- 
hold, the  possible  dissolution  of  our  civihza- 
tion,  is  nothing  else  than  the  world's  collision 
with  love. 


(au^^  f^^^>S    li^    ^^-^^' 


UL. 


V 

Now  the  complete  opposite  of  the  mind  of 
Christ  is  the  Prussian  idea  of  the  State, 
and  of  the  quahty  of  individual  man  thereby- 
required.  The  conception  that  the  might  and 
glory  of  the  State  are  the  true  end  of  man,  and 
especially  that  the  State  is  superior  to  morals — 
doubtless  this  has  been  the  basis  of  much  of  the 
world's  governmental  procedure.  But  other 
nations  at  least  have  had  their  ideals  of  a  nobler 
politic ;  it  is  only  in  Prussia  that  this  conception 
is  the  written  law  and  gospel  of  national  ac- 
tion. 

It  is  this  Prussian  quest  for  an  objective  and 
material  might,  and  not  for  an  inner  and  spirit- 
ual right,  that  Germany  has  pursued  and  pur- 
sues. And  it  is  the  absence  of  a  truly  spiritual 
ideal  that  has  debarred  the  German  peoples 
from  political  knowledge  or  initiative. 

22 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  23 

For  the  German  Empire  is  not  a  political 
organization;  neither  has  it  a  political  genesis. 
There  was  a  romantic  feeling  for  unity  among 
German  States,  but  it  was  not  strong  enough 
to  prevent  their  docile  submission  to  the  Prus- 
sian yoke.  The  passionate  aspiration  that  led 
to  the  liberation  and  unity  of  Italy,  and  that 
now  pervades  the  heroic  remnants  of  the  Serv- 
ian and  Belgian  peoples,  is  foreign  to  Ger- 
man experience  and  understanding.  The  long 
political  evolution  of  the  French  and  Anglo- 
Saxon  peoples  is  likewise  alien  to  German  de- 
velopment. The  German  Empire  is  purely 
the  arbitrary  and  accidental  creation  of  the 
Prussian  sword.  It  has  no  indigenous  roots, 
no  historical  reason  for  being,  in  the  German 
peoples  themselves.  The  Empire  is  a  military 
organization,  operated  for  commercial  ends. 
Or,  rather,  it  is  a  business  corporation,  equipped 
for  military  conquest  and  the  economic  mastery 
of  the  world.  In  no  true  sense  is  Germany  a  | 
political  State. 

We  must  remember  that  much  of  the  land 


y 


24  THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE 

now  occupied  by  East  Germans,  and  prac- 
tically the  whole  of  Prussia,  excepting  Han- 
over, was  wrested  from  the  Slavs  by  sheer  mil- 
itary theft  and  systematic  extermination — ^by 
the  familiar  modes  of  the  Teutonic  Knights, 
the  most  brutal  and  burglarious  of  all  the  rob- 
ber baron  hordes;  whence  Prussia  remains  to 
this  day  not  a  nation  in  fact,  but  a  robber  baron 
locality  with  a  robber  baron  psychology. 
Neither  the  method  nor  the  mind  of  Prussia 
could  be  better  expressed  than  in  the  words  of 
Krizanic,  a  Croat  Catholic  priest  and  a  Pan- 
Slav  apostle,  who  went  to  Petrograd  about  the 
year  1660,  and  who  was  a  great  and  devout 
figure  in  the  Slav  world  of  that  time:  "The 
Germans  have  driven  us  (Slavs)  from  whole 
districts — Moravia,  Pomerania,  Silesia,  Prus- 
sia. In  Bohemia  there  are  only  very  few  Slavs 
left.  In  Poland  all  the  towns  are  full  of 
strangers  and  we  are  their  slaves ;  it  is  for  them 
that  we  till  the  soil,  for  them  that  we  make  war, 
and  they  remain  to  feast  in  their  houses,  and 
treat  us  as  dogs  and  pigs.     By  their  incessant 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  25 

attacks  and  insults  they  have  reduced  many 
Slavs  who  live  among  them  to  such  a  situation 
of  despair  that  they  are  ashamed  of  their  lan- 
guage and  race,  and  give  themselves  out  as 
members  of  another  nation.  The  Germans, 
after  introducing  themselves  into  all  the  Slav 
States,  are  furious  at  not  having  been  able  yet 
to  reduce  to  their  power  the  Russian  Empire, 
which  God  has  always  preserved  from  their 
yoke.  Hence  of  all  Slavs  they  most  detest  the 
Russians,  and  do  all  they  can  to  harm  them,  and 
spread  the  most  infamous  reports  about  them. 
They  have  managed  to  make  the  Russians  ab- 
solutely despised  in  Europe  and  to  divide  them, 
continually  sowing  among  them  causes  of  in- 
testinal quarrel."  We  have  here  in  the  preda- 
tory process  described  by  Krizanic  a  perfect 
picture  of  Prussian  ethic  and  action.  And  the 
ethic  and  action  are  the  same,  bedizened  and 
sublimated  by  the  professors,  as  the  avowed 
principle  and  practice  of  the  Prussia  of  to- 
day. 

The  world  cannot  tolerate  a  nation  proceed- 


26  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

ing  upon  the  Prussian  theory.  The  doctrine 
that  might  makes  right  is  the  arch-lie  of  history. 
According  to  this  he,  the  State  is  justified  by 
whatever  it  does,  if  thereby  it  increases  its 
wealth  and  dominion.  Its  rightness  inheres  in 
its  success ;  and  by  its  success  it  claims  the  sanc- 
tion of  the  teachers  and  the  blessing  of  the 
preachers.  Or  rather,  whatever  enhances  the 
might  and  the  glory  of  the  State  is  more  than 
right.  For  the  State,  by  this  doctrine,  is  super- 
moral,  is  above  considerations  of  right  and 
wrong.  It  has  nothing  to  do  v/ith  justice  or 
injustice  in  its  relation  to  other  States,  to  the 
outer  world :  it  has  only  to  do  with  its  own  self - 
enhancement,  its  own  self -extension.  What- 
ever accomplishes  its  own  increase  is  higher 
than  the  rights  of  States  or  peoples  weaker  than 
itself:  its  conquering  will  needs  no  other  justi- 
fication than  the  proof  of  its  power  to  conquer. 


VI 

THE  Prussian  political  philosophy  is  no 
secret;  it  is  not  something  that  has  to  be 
deduced  or  searched  for.  It  is  the  foundation 
upon  which  Germany  builds.  It  is  the  primal 
principle  of  her  present  educational  system. 
It  has  been  proclaimed  from  all  the  pinnacles 
of  German  aspiration  and  achievement.  It  is 
the  root  and  reason  of  the  "Kultur"  which  Ger- 
many would  impose  upon  the  world  by  the 
sword.  Her  philoso^Dhers,  saving  Kant,  have 
largely  laboured  in  its  behalf.  The  final  mean- 
ing of  Hegel,  in  so  far  as  he  means  anything 
at  all,  resolves  itself  into  a  tricky  and  transcen- 
dentalized  Prussian  pohtic.  William  James 
was  frank  enough  to  say  that  neither  he  nor 
any  man  could  truthfully  assert  he  knew  what 
Hegel  meant.  But  when  this  master-charla- 
tan of  philosophy  is  hunted  to  his  verbarian 

27 


28  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

lair,  and  his  historical  philosophy  there  sub- 
jected to  such  analysis  as  we  can  give  it,  we 
find  it  to  be  but  the  monumental  mystification 
and  sanctification  of  the  self -same  theory  that 
Bernhardi  upholds  and  that  Bismarck  acted 
upon.  The  Hegelian  notion  of  the  State  as 
the  self-unf  oldment  of  the  divine  idea  is  but  the 
brazen  setting-forth  of  sheer  national  might  as 
the  world  and  will  of  God.  There  are  pages 
of  even  Fichte — who  attempts  to  justify  and 
defend  Machiavelli — ^that  come  to  the  same 
self-sufficient  and  rapacious  conclusion.  Man 
is  reduced  to  the  status  of  a  political  beast,  and 
his  beasthood  invested  with  a  kind  of  monstrous 
mysticism. 

But  the  sum  of  the  Prussian  idea  is  best 
given  by  Heinrich  von  Treitschke.  '*If  we 
now,"  he  says,  *'apply  this  standard  of  truly 
Christian  morality  to  the  State,  and  if  we  re- 
member that  the  essence  of  this  great  collective 
personality  is  Power,  then  it  is  the  highest 
moral  duty  of  the  State  to  be  concerned  for  its 
Power."     He  then  declares  that  "the  Christian 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  29 

duty  of  self-sacrifice  for  something  higher  has 
no  existence  whatever  for  the  State,  for  there 
is  nothing  whatever  beyond  it  in  world  history ; 
consequently  it  cannot  sacrifice  itself  for  any- 
thing higher."  He  thus  naturally  concludes 
"that  we  must  distinguish  between  public  and 
private  morality.  Since  the  State  is  Power, 
the  sequence  and  ordering  of  its  various  ob- 
ligations must  be  quite  other  than  that  applic- 
able to  the  individual.  A  whole  series  of  these 
duties  incumbent  upon  him  are  not  to  be 
thought  of  for  the  State.  For  it  the  supreme 
commandment  is  self-assertion;  for  it  that  is 
absolutely  moral.  And  therefore  we  must  de- 
clare that  of  all  political  sins  that  of  weakness 
is  the  most  reprehensible  and  contemptible;  it 
is  in  politics  the  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost." 
This  means,  consequently,  that  every  Ger- 
man, when  acting  as  a  political  or  military  be- 
ing, when  serving  as  an  agent  of  the  Father- 
land, is  absolved  from  pity  and  scruples.  The 
Fatherland  becomes  an  end  that  justifies  the 
most  immoral  and  inhuman  of  means.     To  be 


30  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

a  spy  and  a  traitor  in  the  house  of  a  French 
or  EngHsh  friend,  to  accept  personal  or  na- 
tional hospitahty  as  a  means  of  destroying  the 
host,  becomes  righteous  and  glorious.  The 
lowest  human  actions  become  sacraments  of  a 
super-patriotism  worthy  of  Hassan  ben  Sab- 
bah — a  patriotism  that  supersedes  all  truth,  all 
honour,  even  natural  feelings  that  are  common 
to  man  and  the  beasts.  The  progress  of  Ger- 
man "Kultur"  is  thus  synonymous  with  the 
spiritual  destruction  of  the  world. 

For  it  is  impossible  that  we  separate  one  part 
of  being  from  another.  If  a  man  is  absolved 
from  moral  obligation  in  one  sphere,  he  will  at 
last  so  act  in  every  sphere.  If  a  nation  ab- 
solve itself  from  moral  relations  with  other  na- 
tions, it  becomes  a  vampire  upon  the  universal 
body.  And  this  the  Germany  of  the  last  half- 
century  has  consistently  and  constantly  demon- 
strated. She  stood  against  reform  in  Russia, 
she  thwarted,  by  her  own  military  persistence, 
the  pacifist  desires  of  France;  she  blocked  the 
wheels  of  social  reconstruction  in  England ;  she 


THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE  31 

has  been  a  source  of  national  disintegration  in 
America ;  she  plunged  the  Turk  into  irretrieva- 
ble ruin;  she  turned  the  Balkan  peoples  upon 
each  other  when  they  were  on  the  way  to  federa- 
tion; she  kept  the  Hague  tribunal  from  becom- 
ing effectual;  her  intrigues  with  the  Vatican, 
her  financial  aggressions  in  Italy  have  been  the 
kingdom's  deep  and  disturbing  disease.  Gov- 
ernmental  Gervmny  has  steadfastly  stood  for 
international  distrust,  disruption,  and  debauch- 
ery. She  has  religiously  laboured  for  the  deg- 
radation of  the  nations,  in  order  that  she  might 
so  reduce  their  defensive  power  as  to  bring 
them  into  subjection  to  herself.  There  is  not 
a  principle  of  universal  public  law  or  better- 
ment that  Germany  has  not  combated  or  de- 
feated. There  is  not  an  effort  toward  inter- 
national faith  or  fraternity  that  Germany  has 
not  derided  or  baffled.  She  has  literally  turned 
back  the  hands  on  the  clock  of  the  world's  prog- 
ress. She  stands  squarely  in  the  world's  way 
into  a  new  and  nobler  era.  Humanity  is  at  a 
standstill  before  the  Prussian  sword  and  sys- 


32  THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE 

tern.  There  can  he  no  peace,  nor  can  the  race 
take  another  onward  step,  until  that  sword  and 
that  system  are  destroyed.  And  the  would-be 
makers  of  another  peace  than  this,  no  matter 
who  they  are,  nor  how  high  their  motives,  are 
no  less  than  Satanic  seducers  of  the  soul  of  the 
world. 


VII 

IT  is  not  that  the  German  peoples  are  bad, 
or  that  the  peoples  who  constitute  the  Allies 
are  good.  By  no  such  childish  comparisons  is 
the  conflict  or  its  question  to  be  understood. 
The  virtues  of  the  average  German,  in  com- 
parison with  the  virtues  of  the  average  Eng- 
lishman, have  nothing  to  do  with  the  decision 
we  must  each  make  as  to  what  the  war  is  about, 
and  as  to  which  of  the  two  lines  of  battle  we 
shall  render  such  service  as  we  may.  The 
standard  and  practice  of  the  individual  Ger- 
man might  be  higher  than  the  standard  and 
practice  of  the  individual  Englishman,  and  still 
the  German  be  fighting  for  a  leadership  that 
is  anti-human  and  Satanic.  The  German  man 
and  woman  might  be  dutiful,  home-loving,  and 
industrious  beyond  the  man  or  woman  of 
France,  and  yet  the  mind  of  the  German  col- 

33 


34  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

lectivity  be  perverse  in  its  purpose,  and  the 
German  kind  of  progress  be  a  reversion  of  the 
divine  course  of  history.  The  good  man  may 
become  insane  through  following  a  false  or 
mistaken  idea,  and  that  despite  his  goodness; 
the  wise  or  the  sweet  or  the  brave  may  pass  un- 
der the  power  of  a  destructive  sophistry.  So 
a  great  people  may  become  collectively  and 
darkly  obsessed  by  a  damning  idea,  a  stu- 
pendous delusion.  In  the  American  Civil 
War  the  average  Southern  leader  was  undoubt- 
edly a  more  admirable  gentleman  than  the 
average  leader  of  the  North ;  but  the  collective 
Southern  mind  was  for  disunion  and  slavery, 
and  the  collective  Northern  mind  was  for  na- 
tional unity  and  the  freedom  of  the  slave. 
History  is  not  poor  in  examples  of  individually 
superior  peoples  fighting  collectively  for  causes 
that  were  dark  and  debasing.  I  am  not  for  a 
moment  admitting  the  truth  of  the  German  as- 
sumption of  a  superior  culture  and  citizenry: 
I  am  only  saying  that,  even  were  the  assump- 
tion true,  it  would  not  necessarily  bear  upon  the 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  35 

issue  raised  by  the  war.  The  notion  that  the 
right  or  wrong  of  the  war  can  be  decided  by  de- 
bating or  comparing  the  average  individual  vir- 
tues of  the  respective  combatants  proceeds 
from  a  pitiful  ignorance  of  either  individual  or 
social  psychology. 

Let  us  remember,  besides,  that  a  wrong  cause 
generally  appears  in  a  more  plausible  and  ap- 
pealing garb  than  the  cause  that  is  right.  The 
cause  that  is  just,  the  truth  that  cleaves  through 
the  foundations  of  entrenched  and  honoured 
wrong,  rarely  presents  itself  in  a  comeliness 
comparable  with  that  of  its  opponents.  The 
strong  and  sustained  delusions  are  usually  ar- 
rayed in  an  appearance  of  power  and  benefic- 
ence that  make  them  seem  desirable.  The 
great  wolves  of  history  have  always  presented 
themselves  as  good  shepherds  and  saviours  of 
the  nations  upon  which  they  preyed.  The 
force  that  has  been  personalized  as  Satan  never 
appears,  in  the  crises  of  men,  as  other  than  an 
angel  of  light.  How  else  should  it  appear? 
It  is  we  who  are  fools,  but  no  fool  is  Satan.     It 


36  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

is  the  good  who  are  slow  and  stupid  and  bhnd: 
it  is  the  evil  that  sees,  that  seizes,  that  executes. 
It  is  the  Prussian  mind  that  has  permeated  the 
world,  and  therethrough  implanted  itself  or 
its  seed,  beyond  aught  the  world  now  knows; 
while  such  as  literally  believe  in  the  Christ,  such 
as  have  confidence  in  the  efficient  power  of  his 
love  to  organize  the  world — ^these  are  an  un- 
heeded and  baffled  few,  a  scattered  and  shame- 
faced remnant. 


VIII 

GERMANY  has  had  her  ideahsm,  it  is  true. 
I  am  not  forgetting  her  philosophers  and 
theologians,  her  poets  and  romanticists.  Nor 
do  I  forget  that  music,  the  first  and  last  lan- 
guage of  the  soul,  is  especially  a  German  de- 
velopment. I  remember  that  Beethoven — 
perhaps  the  largest  German  intellect  as  well  as 
a  supreme  expresser  of  the  upward  yearnings 
of  European  man — was  also  a  hater  of  tyrants 
and  tyrannies.  I  remember,  too,  that  it  was 
Kant  who  definitely  proposed  arbitration  be- 
tween the  nations.  Yet  it  is  Germany  herself 
that  has  been  false  to  the  nobler  side  of  Kant, 
and  that  has  forsaken  the  freedom  Beethoven 
so  passionately  loved.  And  leaving  these  two 
for  the  moment,  we  must  observe  that  German 
idealism,  on  the  whole,  belongs  within  vague 
and  narrow  boundaries  of  time  and  percep- 

37 


38  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

tion;  and  also  that  it  has  largely  partaken  of 
the  nature  of  a  spiritual  and  intellectual  self- 
indulgence.  German  idealism  has  been  neither 
national  nor  synthetic.  It  has  been  expressive 
of  no  unifying  aspiration  or  purpose  among 
the  German  peoples.  It  has  never  been  widely 
or  profoundly  human.  Goethe  is  the  princely 
anarchist,  and  Schiller  the  sentimentalist  who 
could  never  escape  being  sickly  as  well  as  sub- 
lime. Goethe  had  httle  interest  in  a  German 
nation,  and  was  as  provincial  and  parochial  in 
one  sense  as  he  was  universal  in  another.  It 
mattered  little  to  him  whether  Napoleon  or  the 
feudal  princelings — at  once  comic  and  bar- 
barous— ruled  the  German  States.  He  was 
quite  content  if  his  Weimar  and  his  Thurin- 
gian  woods  were  preserved  for  his  pedal  and 
mental  peregrinations.  If  we  think  of  Dante's 
identification  of  himself  with  Italy,  if  we  think 
how  England  fills  Shakespeare's  perspective, 
and  then  of  how  little  Germany  has  to  do  with 
Goethe's  intellections,  we  glimpse  the  differ- 
ence between  a  poet  who  incarnates  the  soul  of 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  39 

a  nation  and  one  for  whom  the  nation  scarcely 
exists,  or  for  whom  it  is  a  matter  of  incidental 
concern.     Where  the  idealists  of  France  are 
revolutionary  and  creative,  where  England's 
idealists  are  always  appealing  for  a  sublimer 
national  being,  the  German  idealists  are  ro- . . 
mantic,  discursive,  and  irresponsible.     There 
is  a  sort   of  super-puerility,   a  metaphysical, 
whine,  a  self-gratifying  pessimism,  seldom  ab- 
sent from  the  German  attitude  toward  life.  . 
The  religious  emotionalism  produced  by  an  ] 
abundance  of  beer,  and  by  the  cherished  sor- 
rows of  transient  but  remembered  loves,  trans- ; 
mute  themselves  into  theology  and  mystical 
philosophy. 

Of  course  the  world  should  not  be  without 
Germany's  conceptual  and  speculative  philoso- 
phy ;  nor  without  her  religious  ratiocinations  or 
her  romantic  literature.  For  they  bring  an 
idealism  that  is  a  precious  and  perpetual  con- 
tribution to  the  birth  and  growth  of  the  ulti- 
mate world-soul ;  an  idealism  we  shall  the  bet- 
ter love  and  cherish  when  nation  understands 


./" 


40  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

nation,  and  the  world  has  become  one.  But, 
even  so,  the  distinctly  German  mood  is  neither 
manful  nor  uniting;  nor  has  it  been  creative  of 
a  true  mental  or  spiritual  universality.  It  has 
produced  no  such  rebels  of  God  as  Socrates  and 
Jesus,  Dante  and  Mazzini,  Milton  and  Vol- 
taire, Emerson  and  Whitman;  and  the  mind 
of  the  German  Empire  has  been  made  by  her 
Hohenzollerns  and  Bismarcks.  It  is  the  mind 
that  now  seeks  world-dominion  through  mih- 
tary  might;  through  industrial  technique  and 
commercial  conquest.  And  into  her  present 
thought  and  action,  the  idealisms  of  the  Ger- 
many of  the  past  have  been  received  as  a  kind 
of  ruminative  beverage.  They  are  in  no  wise 
inspirative  of  national  nobility,  nor  do  they 
neutralize  the  issue  that  Germany  has  so 
stealthily  and  ruthlessly  thrust  upon  the  peo- 
ples beyond  her  borders. 


IX 

THE  German  peril  cannot  be  disproved  by 
the  superior  efficiency  of  German  organ- 
ization. Let  us  grant  the  superiority  at  once. 
The  German  collectivity  is  established  and  sus- 
tained by  a  skill  and  a  responsibihty  that  no 
other  nation  approaches.  No  other  collectiv- 
ity has  developed  so  shrewd  a  social  foresight ; 
such  perfection  of  industrial  technique;  such 
application  of  scientific  inquiry  to  productive 
processes,  to  tangible  facts  and  forces.  No 
other  collectivity  so  grasps  and  directs  its  ma- 
terials; so  removes  the  element  of  chance;  so 
provides  for  the  material  security  and  physical 
ease  of  its  members.  In  all  that  pertains  to 
the  objective  well-being  of  labour,  to  the  eco- 
nomic and  cultural  care  of  motherhood  and 
childhood,  to  provision  against  sickness  and  old 
age,  Germany  leads  the  world.     She  also  leads 

41 


42  THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE 

it  in  matters  of  technical  education,  and  in  the 
training  of  each  man  as  a  unit  of  the  national 
whole.  Her  autocratic  will  and  method  have 
accomplished,  on  behalf  of  the  average  man, 
that  social  shelter  and  assurance,  that  protec- 
tion from  harm  and  hunger,  which  the  demo- 
cratic nations  have  so  stubbornly  and  ignor- 
antly  refused.  We  must  not  deny — we  must 
admit  to  our  infinite  shame — that  German  or- 
ganization is  proficient  and  providential  be- 
yond anything  that  English  or  French  or 
American  organization  has  considered  or  at- 
tempted. In  fact,  it  is  only  in  Germany  that 
/  social  organization  may  be  said  to  exist  at  all. 
The  collectivities  of  France  and  England  are 
I  unorganized;  and  America  is  not  a  collectivity 
I  but  a  heterogeneous  mass,  a  social  and  in- 
dustrial anarchy. 

Yet  having  ungrudgingly  confessed  the  su- 
periority of  the  German  social  arrangements, 
having  rehearsed  their  wide  and  common  ma- 
terial beneficence,  it  remains  for  us  to  inquire 
as  to  their  effect  upon  the  individual,  and  upon 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  43 

Germany's  conception  of  her  place  among  the 
nations.  It  is  good  to  be  well  housed  and  well 
fed;  good  to  be  protected  in  the  performance 
of  one's  labour ;  good  to  be  provided  for  in  sick- 
ness and  old  age;  good  to  be  fitted  into  one's 
place  in  a  perfected  economic  machine.  But 
if  these  values  are  obtained  at  the  expense  of 
infinitely  greater  values;  if  they  are  made  the 
end  instead  of  the  means  of  well-being;  if  they 
derive  from  such  a  source,  if  they  proceed  upon 
such  a  principle,  as  to  make  of  the  average  man 
a  mere  automaton;  if  they  are  destructive  in- 
stead of  creative  of  personality;  then  the  best 
organization  the  autocratic  principle  can 
achieve  is  but  a  deathful  illusion.  It  is  an  effi- 
ciency fraught  with  spiritual  atrophy,  dissipat- 
ing instead  of  conserving  the  final  values.  For 
objective  order  and  coherency  are  not  ends  in 
themselves;  nor  in  themselves  do  they  consti- 
tute the  well-being  of  either  society  or  the 
individual.  Their  purpose  is  to  afford  oppor- 
tunity for  well-being,  but  they  are  not  well-be- 
ing itself. 


44  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

Furthermore,  it  is  not  possible  that  auto- 
cratic might  may  conceive  or  construct  social 
right ;  not  possible  for  it  to  provide  a  true  rea- 
son for  social  being.  Nor  may  it  set  before 
the  collectivity  an  upleading  social  goal.  In- 
deed, the  most  perfect  organization  autocracy 
may  provide  inevitably  must  result  in  social 
paralysis,  in  spiritual  death.  The  highest  ma- 
terial efficiency  might  be  so  conceived  and  made 
effectual  as  to  prove  itself  the  product  and  pro- 
ducer of  a  fatal  spiritual  inefficiency. 

And  precisely  this  has  happened  in  Ger- 
many. The  very  docility  of  the  people  under 
the  dominion  of  the  Prussian  idea  and  system, 
their  childish  belief  in  the  hes  laid  upon  them 
by  their  masters,  are  proof  enough  of  the  spirit- 
ual fatuity  of  German  material  and  technical 
co-ordination.  The  wise  farmer  would  rela- 
tively do  for  his  cattle,  the  wise  slave-holder 
would  relatively  do  for  his  slaves,  the  things 
so  well  done  by  the  Prussian  State  for  the  Prus- 
sian people.  But  the  cattle  would  be  no  less 
cattle  for  being  well-fed  and  well-herded;  the 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  45 

slave  would  be  rendered  no  less  a  slave  by  the 
self-interested  care  of  his  owner ;  and  the  Prus- 
sian is  no  less  an  automaton  because  the  State 
so  provides  for  his  life  as  to  make  him  an  effi- 
cient instrument  of  war  and  production. 

The  end  of  German  social  organization  is  not 
human  well-being^  but  material  and  military 
conquest.  It  is  not  motived  in  the  develop- 
ment of  personality,  but  in  the  depersonaliza- 
tion of  man,  making  him  a  perfected  mechanic 
means  to  a  devouring  mechanic  end,  and  re- 
sulting in  the  falsification  of  both  faith  and  ac- 
tion. Its  end  is  the  materialization  of  the 
spiritual,  and  not  the  spiritualization  of  the  ma- 
terial. Masquerading  as  an  approach  to  so- 
cialism, it  is  the  precise  enemy  and  opposite  of 
the  socialism  that  is  essential  or  real.  In  fine, 
the  social  efficiency  of  the  German  State,  fun- 
damentally effecting  the  unmaking  of  man,  is 
but  an  inward  manifestation  of  the  idea  whose 
outward  manifestation  is  the  lawless  quest  for 
world-dominion.  It  is  merely  the  preliminary 
of  the  Prussian  will  to  power — the  prepara- 


46  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

tory  process  of  the  might  that  regards  itself  as 
superior  to  right,  and  as  divinely  appointed  to 
destroy  the  old  world  and  to  create  a  new  world 
in  its  own  monstrous  image. 

Thus  the  Prussian  social  theory  is  as  fatuous 
as  the  Prussian  doctrine  of  dominion.  No 
strongest  nor  securest  State,  nor  any  super- 
powers, may  do  for  the  peoples  the  things  that 
they  must  fraternally  and  freely  do  for  them- 
selves; and  every  semblance  of  common  well- 
being  procured  from  without  or  from  above  is 
but  the  ultimate  undoing  of  both  the  single  man 
and  the  social  people.  If  democracy  cannot 
acquire  the  requisite  technique  for  its  own  ef- 
fectuation in  labour  and  life;  if  freedom  and 
order  are  not  able  to  march  together;  if  fra- 
ternity cannot  a  thousandfold  fulfil  the  effi- 
ciencies inhering  in  the  ablest  autocracy ;  if  uni- 
versal and  individual  well-being  can  be  pro- 
cured only  of  men  commonly  consenting  to  be 
sheep  in  times  of  peace  and  hyenas  in  times  of 
war,  instead  of  men  resolving  to  be  the  unhin- 
dered and  adventuring  sons  of  God;  then  the 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  47 

human  game  is  not  worth  the  candle.  Assured  j 
physical  well-being  is  not  worth  the  Prussian  j 
spiritual  price. 


X 

WE  may  not  evade  deciding  between  the 
Germanic  powers  and  the  Allies  by  re- 
citing the  sins  of  England,  of  France,  or  of 
Russia.  The  choice  which  Germany  now 
forces  upon  the  world  cannot  be  dissolved  in 
a  Cossack  peril  or  hidden  in  the  wrongs  of  Ire- 
land. I  will  not  dispute  the  despotic  deeds  of 
Russian  rulers  or  the  sorrows  of  the  Russian 
peoples.  Say  what  you  will  of  England's 
duplicities,  of  her  historical  hypocrisies  and 
stupidities ;  you  may  not  thus  becloud  or  dissi- 
pate the  issue  raised  by  the  German  challenge. 
Irrespective  of  Anglo-Saxon  or  Russian  merits 
or  demerits,  the  fact  remains  that  the  German 
and  the  Turkish  armies  are  led  to  battle  on  be- 
half of  the  autocratic  principle  and  its  Prus- 
sian prevailment.  They  are  fighting,  however 
blindly,  to  establish  the  biological  or  mechan- 

48 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  49 

istic  conception  of  man.  On  the  other  hand, 
with  all  their  faults,  the  Allies  are  fighting  for 
the  establishment  of  the  democratic  or  mutual- 
istic  principle.  Their  goal  is  the  right  of  each 
people,  large  or  small,  to  be  loosed  from  foreign 
dominion,  to  follow  the  law  of  its  own  being 
and  development,  and  to  be  freed  from  the  ex- 
hausting necessity  of  military  defence. 

For  the  Allies  are  also  making  war  against  t 
war.     They  would  disarm  the  Prussian  mil-  i 
itarism  in  order  that  they  may  be  free  to  disarm  j 
themselves.     And  the  armies  of  the  Allies  are 
more  and  more  conscious  of  what  they  are  fight- 
ing for;  and  if  the  soldiers  return  to  their 
homes  victorious,  the  things  they  are  fighting 
for  they  will  have ;  nor  capitalists  nor  political 
plotters  will  be  able  to  prevent  their  coming 
into  their  own. 

Nor  is  the  militarism  of  Prussia  counter- 
balanced, as  the  pacifists  say,  by  the  navalism 
of  England.  The  claim  of  Germany  that  she 
is  fighting  for  the  freedom  of  the  seas  is  as 
truthless  as  her  earlier  claim  that  she  was  de- 


50  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

fending    herself    against    Russian    invasion. 
Germany  has  had  the  freedom  of  the  seas, 
/  She  has  built  up  her  phenomenal  merchant 
I    marine  without  let  or  hindrance  from  the  Brit- 
ish fleet,  entering  the  ports  of  the  world  at  will, 
'   She  has   been   absorbing   England's   ancient 
trade  practically  under  the  protection  of  Eng- 
land's ships  of  war.     Bear  in  mind  that  it  is 
but  a  few  years  since  the  British  fleet  was 
I    rapidly  becoming  obsolete.     It  was  the  build- 
I     ing  of  the  German  Navy,  and  the  constant 
I      threat  of  German  attack,  that  impelled  Eng- 
!      land  to  a  rebuilding  of  her  fleet.     Nothing  but 
\      the  German  menace  produced  England's  naval 
\      renaissance.     Had  Germany  pursued  commer- 
\      cial  methods  alone,  her  ships  might  have  sailed 
\      the  seas  unchallenged,  and  much  of  the  mari- 
time conmierce  of  the  world  have  been  freely 
hers. 

Then,  aside  from  the  question  of  the  seas, 
is  it  not  time  to  change,  or  at  least  to  modify, 
the  ancient  fashion  of  rehearsing  the  perfidies 
of  Albion?     Would  it  not  be  decent  and  prof- 


THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE  51 

itable,  on  the  part  of  individuals  and  nations, 
to  consider  what  the  whole  race  of  men  has 
received  from  England?  Consider  the  king- 
doms and  the  countries  which  the  empires  of 
old  have  conquered  and  absorbed  and  ex- 
hausted; and  then  look  at  the  brotherhood  of 
self-governing  and  democratic  States  that  are 
linked  together  under  England's  flag — Can- 
ada, Australia,  New  Zealand,  and  the  lesser 
colonies.  Let  those  of  us  who  so  vehemently 
denounced  the  conquest  of  the  Boers  now  ac- 
knowledge the  wonder  of  South  Africa,  rejoic- 
ing in  freedom  and  unity,  in  the  opportunity 
for  national  greatness,  received  so  generously 
and  promptly  from  England's  hand.  Let  us 
look  upon  the  great  Republic  that  England 
begot  in  America — even  though  she  was  a 
peevish  and  uncomprehending  mother  awhile. 
And  if  India  and  Egypt  become  nations  in  fact, 
if  they  become  free  and  self-governing,  it  is 
from  England  they  will  have  received  the  train- 
ing and  the  power  so  to  become — and  this  in 
spite  of  the  greed  and  the  grievous  wrongs 


52  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

that  have  gone  with  England's  government  of 
ahen  peoples.  Nor  should  we  forget  what 
Italy  and  Greece  owe  to  England;  nor  forget 
that  even  Prussia,  alas !  owes  the  opportunities 
she  has  used  for  her  dread  self -enhancement  to 
England's  direct  and  indirect  actions.  If  we 
are  honest  and  just  in  our  historical  perspec- 
tive, we  are  bound  to  place  beside  her  famed 
and  familiar  perfidies  the  other  fact  that  Eng- 
land, almost  alone  among  the  nations,  has, 
often  blunderingly  enough,  fought  for  the  free- 
dom of  the  world.  Where  other  empires  have 
/  destroyed,  the  British  Empire  has  built  and 
j  restored.  Among  historic  nations,  England  is 
supremely  the  builder.  If  we  except  the 
?  tragedy  of  Ireland,  if  we  acknowledge  the 
shame  of  India,  we  must  consent  that  the  course 
of  England  in  the  world  has  been,  on  the  whole, 
and  that  through  a  millennium  of  time,  con- 
structive and  redemptive.  Blindly  if  you  will, 
and  all  unconscious  of  what  she  is  doing,  and 
amidst  interminable  muddles  and  delays, 
amidst  an  unceasing  self-criticism  as  well,  it  is 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  53 

England — yes,  it  is  England — ^that  literally 
has  been  preparing  the  world  for  fraternal  fed- 
eration. Let  us  hold  our  tongues  for  a  day, 
and  bow  before  the  stupendous  fact,  divine 
despite  its  deep  and  many  flaws. 

Nor  is  Russia  a  justification  for  Germany.  | 
The  struggle  of  Russia  is  now,  and  has  been  for ! 
two  hundred  years,  to  free  herself  from  Ger- 
man masters.     The   political   conniptions   of 
Russia  are  of  German  origin.     The  Russian 
bureaucracy    is    not    Russian,    but    German. 
Every  effort  of  Russia  toward  liberty,  or  to-  i 
ward  the  protection  of  the  smaller  Slav  peo- 
ples, has  been  thwarted  by  the  threat  of  the 
German  sword.     And  Russia  is  full  of  the  ma- 
terials requisite  for  the  building  of  the  new 
heaven   and  the   new   earth.     In  her   broad 
communistic  base,  in  her  profound  mystical| 
heredity,   is   the   promise   of   a   sweeter   and 
braver     society     than     mankind     has     yet 
known. 

And  France !     Before  the  inevitabihtv  of  de- 
fending  herself  against  Germany  became  ob- 


54  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

vious,  France  was  rapidly  on  the  way  to  pac- 
ifism. It  was  the  aggressive  attitude  of  Ger- 
many that  compelled  France,  against  her  will, 
to  become  again  a  military  nation.  And  the 
soldiers  of  France,  unprepared  as  they  were, 
have  been  the  living  wall  against  which  the  dis- 
ciphned  German  hordes  have  beat  in  vain.  It 
is  France,  after  the  sublime  and  unprecedented 
self-sacrifice  of  Belgimn,  that  has  borne  the 
brunt  of  the  German  assault  upon  humanity. 
"We  are  fighting  not  merely  for  the  interests 
of  our  respective  countries,"  said  General 
Joffre,  "but  also  for  the  liberation  of  the  world, 
and  we  shall  not  stop  until  the  Uberties  of  the 
world  are  definitely  assured."  General  Joffre 
spake  truly.  The  France  that  destroyed  feu- 
dalism in  Europe  and  gave  freedom  to  Amer- 
ica, the  France  that  receives  and  deserves  the 
love  of  the  world  as  no  other  nation  has  ever 
received  or  deserved  it,  is  again  bearing  the 
burden  of  the  world's  destiny;  and  bearing  it 
vicariously.  Yes,  the  France  of  to-day  is  lit- 
erally Messianic,  dying  for  the  salvation  of  the 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  55 

race,  suffering  in  order  that  freedom  and  frater- 
nal faith  may  have  a  future  in  the  world. 

And  with  France  marches  Italy,  not  only 
struggling  to  realize  her  national  soul,  but  to 
free  herself  from  the  yoke  of  a  brutal  German 
finance.  Her  part  in  the  war,  whatever  its 
preliminary  diplomatic  twistings  and  turnings, 
is  her  affirmation  of  her  right  to  be,  of  her  right 
to  give  herself.  And  when  the  victory  is  won, 
Italy,  supported  by  her  understanding  king,  so 
quiet  yet  heroic  in  word  and  action,  will  stand 
once  again  for  a  united  humanity.  The  idea 
of  a  human  race  become  as  one  fold  and  one 
family,  its  activities  infinitely  diversified  and 
individualized,  yet  proceeding  from  one  di- 
vinely comprehensive  source  and  centre — this 
is  the  vital  force,  the  very  life-blood,  indeed, 
of  Italy's  being.  It  is  the  one  word  her 
great  voices  have  all  sounded  forth — from  Vir- 
gil to  Carducci,  from  St.  Francis  to  Mazzini. 
And  it  is  the  fundamental  and  indispensable 
contribution  which  Italy,  finally  free  and  self- 
realizing,  will  give  to  the  world. 


XI 

BUT  think  not  that  in  opposing  the  Prus- 
sian idea,  in  condemning  the  Germany 
to  which  that  idea  has  become  an  obsession, 
and  in  approving  the  French  and  Enghsh  de- 
fence of  the  world,  I  thereby  support,  as  some 
would  say,  the  whole  of  French  and  English 
historical  action.  Nor  do  I  thereby  support 
Russian  despotism  or  Italian  Machiavellism. 
It  is  true,  as  I  have  admitted,  that  England  has 
often  been  false  to  the  principle  for  which  she 
now  fights.  It  is  true  that  France  has  not  fol- 
lowed the  logic  of  her  great  Revolution  in  her 
social  development.  It  is  true  that  the  Italy 
of  the  past  generation  has  been  false  to  the  faith 
of  Mazzini,  to  the  work  of  Cavour.  It  is  true 
that  the  Russian  State  is  far  from  expressing 
the  dreams  of  Dostoievsky  or  Tolstoy  or 
Gorky.  But  it  is  also  true  that  each  of  these 
nations  has  had  ideals  of  fraternity  and  free- 

56 


THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE  57 

dom,  and  has  at  least  proclaimed  them,  while 
Germany  has  had  but  the  ideal  of  dominion, 
both  in  her  inward  development  and  her  out- 
ward attitude.  In  the  whole  course  of  her  his- 
tory Germany  has  produced  not  a  single  ex- 
ponent of  an  inclusive  or  comprehensive  free-  j 
dom. 

Even  the  socialism  of  Marx  is  based  upon 
the  idea  of  dominion :  the  dominion  of  the  many 
instead  of  the  few;  the  dominion  of  the  social 
totality  over  the  social  units.  Of  an  actual  in- 
dustrial and  social  democracy,  of  the  adminis- 
trative fellowship  of  co-equal  workers,  he  had 
no  true  understanding.  He  had  no  feeling, 
mental  or  moral,  for  the  things  that  are  fra- 
ternal and  federal.  Marx  was  not  an  apostle 
of  freedom :  his  was  not  a  democratic  socialism, 
but  a  blended  intellectual  and  proletarian  autoc- 
racy. His  socialism  was  substantially  Prus- 
sian in  character;  and  the  German  party  built 
upon  the  Marxian  foundation  is  anti-socialist 
in  principle,  in  practice,  and  results.  It  has 
no  shadow  of  right  to  its  name.     Of  essential 


58  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

socialism,  of  fundamental  democracy,  the  Ger- 
man Social  Democratic  Party  is  the  practical 
opponent.  The  social  philosophy  of  Marx  is 
the  historical  philosophy  of  Hegel  and  Treit- 
schke  in  another  form. 

Now  the  Allies — including  even  Russia — 
have  had  apostles  who  believed,  with  Christ,  in 
a  self-governing  Divine  Presence  in  man.  The 
idea  of  an  earthly  kingdom  of  heaven  has  been 
generic  in  their  political  and  ideahstic  philoso- 
phies. England  has  had  her  Milton,  pro- 
claiming the  nation  to  be  but  a  huge  Christian 
personage,  and  the  members  thereof  ordained 
to  be  fitly  joined  together.  Alfred  the  Great 
— perhaps  the  greatest  ruler  among  the  sons 
of  men — naively  regarded  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount  as  the  natural  constitution  of  the  State. 
Nor  ever  has  some  such  idea  been  without  wit- 
nesses in  England.  Scores  of  writers  in  re- 
cent times — writers  of  such  different  mentali- 
ties as  John  Stuart  Mill,  Frederick  Maurice, 
John  Ruskin,  William  Morris,  Alfred  Tenny- 
son, H.  M.  Hyndman,  Bernard  Shaw,  and  Ed- 


THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE  59 

ward  Carpenter — have  been  among  these  wit- 
nesses. False  to  the  idea  as  England  has  often 
been,  it  has  never  been  absent  from  the  national 
heart.  And  the  France  that  looked  upon  the 
light  of  Louis  IX,  of  Joan  of  Arc  and  Abe- 
lard,  in  a  later  time  produced  the  starry  men 
of  the  Revolution,  making  the  gospel  of  Rous- 
seau— not  very  far  from  the  gospel  of  Naz- 
areth— her  national  summons  and  creed;  and 
from  France  went  forth  the  faith  of  Saint- 
Simon  and  Fourrier.  And  Italy's  Mazzini — 
more  nearly  akin  to  Christ  than  any  other 
modern  historical  character — remains,  in  spite 
of  all  he  has  suffered  at  the  hands  of  his  own, 
the  true  expression  and  prophecy  of  the  Italian 
national  soul. 

Germany  has  had  no  such  apostles,  no  such 
ideals.  She  has  not  produced  a  single  spirit 
kindred  to  Mazzini  or  Rousseau  or  Milton. 
Count,  if  you  can,  the  mental  leagues  that  lie 
between  Alfred's  conception  of  the  State  and 
that  of  Treitschke.  Or  try  to  measure  the 
spiritual  spaces  that  stretch  from  Mazzini  to 


60  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

Beriihardi,  from  Bismarck  to  Lincoln.     Con- 
sider the  spiritual  sphere  that  gave  birth  to 

I  Tolstoy  or  Maeterlinck,  to  Bergson  or  Jaures 
or  the  saintly  Paul  Sabatier,  and  then  consider 
the  mental  world  that  produced  that  incredible 
farrago — the  appeal  prepared  by  Germany's 
most  honoured  theologians,  historians,  and 
scientists,  and  sent  forth  to  the  world  in  her 
defence.  The  childish  servility  of  the  German 
intellect,  shepherded  as  it  is  by  the  Prussian 

\  purpose,  could  never  be  better  demonstrated. 
Nor  could  there  be  a  better  demonsti^ation  of 
the  fact  that  it  is  only  in  the  sphere  or  in  the 
pursuit  of  freedom  that  the  stalwart  mind  un- 
folds. Whatever  its  scholastic  or  scientific  at- 
tainments, the  mentaUty  that  issues  from  the 
Prussian  system  will  never  be  else  than  servile 
and  self-indulgent.  No  manful  idea  will  ever 
proceed  from  so  suborned  and  herded  an  intel- 

\  lectualism. 

Even  German  scholarship  has  been  enor- 
mously over-estimated  as  to  its  human  values. 
It  is  a  scholarship  that  has  imposed  upon  the 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  61 

world  by  sheer  bulk,  by  its  pretentious  and  in- 
terminable babble.  We  have  been  awed,  we 
have  been  hypnotized,  by  its  very  unintelligi- 
bility,  as  well  as  by  its  pomp  and  its  quantity. 
Thus  it  has  made  for  a  sort  of  universal  intel- 
lectual humbuggery.  None  of  our  minds  can 
digest  the  grist  that  comes  from  the  German 
mill.  None  of  us  know  what  the  German  man- 
darins mean.  And  the  true  reason  we  do  not 
understand  them  is  because  there  is  so  little  to 
understand.  We  know  this  well  enough,  but 
we  have  not  the  manhood  to  say  so.  We  se- 
cretly see  how  wasteful  it  is — this  exercising  the 
golden  years  of  the  mind  upon  dialectic  chat- 
ter and  chaff;  but  we  go  on  pretending  to  our- 
selves and  the  world  that  the  chaff  is  precious 
grain,  and  the  chatter  a  flow  of  knowledge. 
We  go  on  dissolving  the  soul's  integrity  in 
these  deceptive  pedantries.  For  they  are  ped- 
antries, at  once  childish  and  Cyclopic,  making 
impostors  of  both  learned  professor  and  street 
propagandist.  The  socialist  who  pretends  to 
a  deep  understanding  of  his  Marx,  the  aca- 


62  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

demic  man  who  professes  a  clear  comprehen- 
sion of  German  intellections — they  belong  to 
the  same  category :  they  are  each  of  them  plain 
and  preposterous  liars.  It  is  indeed  an  inhu- 
man scholarship,  a  particularist  and  disinte- 
grating culture,  which  Germany  would  have 
us  accept  at  the  point  of  the  sword.  And  the 
forcing  of  this  culture  upon  the  world  by  mili- 
tary might  has  the  look  of  a  cosmical  joke — 
as  if  Satan  were  permitted  to  satisfy,  for  once, 
his  uttermost  sense  of  humour. 


XII 

So  we  are  at  war,  not  with  German  armies 
merely,  but  with  the  German  world-mind 
and  world-manners — with  Germany's  doctrines 
and  deeds,  so  far  as  they  are  directed  toward 
the  lands  beyond  her  frontiers.  Had  she  been 
content  to  keep  her  mind  and  her  manners  at 
home,  applying  them  only  to  her  own  develop- 
ment, the  nations  could  have  had  nothing  to 
say.  But  she  has  not  been  so  content.  Her 
manners  toward  the  nations,  her  conception  of 
her  super-place  among  them,  her  purpose  to 
impose  her  culture  by  the  might  of  her  arms, 
were  making  a  peaceful  development  of  the 
race  impossible.  Long  before  the  war,  the 
world  was  held  in  a  tightening  tension,  was  in- 
creasingly embroiled  and  degraded  by  the  men- 
ace of  German  arms  and  the  completeness  of 
German  espionage.  But  now  that  the  issue 
between    Germany   and   humanity   has   been 

63 


64  THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE 

joined,  there  must  be  no  turning  back  on  the 
part  of  the  Allies;  nor  must  any  concealment 
or  evasion  of  the  issues  on  the  part  of  the  paci- 
fists or  neutrals  be  permitted. 

Even  where,  as  in  the  case  of  Switzerland, 
an  enforced  political  neutrality  is  the  basis  of 
national  existence,  the  Swiss  as  individuals  are 
not  released  from  the  spiritual  obligation  of 
deciding  between  autocracy  and  democracy. 
The  strength  and  glamour  of  Imperial  Ger- 
many must  not  blind  them  to  the  question  that 
is  the  core  of  the  war.  Shall  Switzerland  for- 
get the  source  from  which  she  sprang?  Shall 
it  be  that,  in  the  hour  when  the  world  was  com- 
pelled to  choose  between  the  glory  and  the 
power  of  material  might  and  the  promise  and 
progress  that  inhere  in  freedom's  world-ad- 
venture— shall  it  be  that,  in  such  an  hour,  the 
Switzerland  of  Zwingli  and  the  Three  Cantons 
gave  her  heart  to  Kaisers  and  Empires,  and 
that  her  sympathies  forsook  the  France  to 
whom  her  own  John  Calvin  gave  spiritual  sus- 
tenance, to  whom  her  own  Rousseau  gave  a 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  65 

gospel  of  freedom?  And  is  not  the  Helvetic 
confederation  finally  the  result  of  French  in- 
tervention? Let  Swiss  souls  give  heed  to  the 
words  of  one  of  her  profoundest  and  devoutest 
teachers,  Professor  Ragaz  of  Zurich,  who  tells 
them  that  it  is  their  own  lack  of  spiritual  ideals, 
their  apostacy  to  their  own  purer  past,  that 
makes  them  partially  responsive  to  the  German 
purpose  and  power.  Let  Switzerland  develop 
the  ideal  of  democracy  that  is  native  to  her  na- 
tional soul,  intensifying  and  spiritualizing  that 
ideal,  applying  that  democracy  to  social  libera- 
tion and  industrial  organization — and,  by  so 
doing,  and  while  maintaining  her  political  neu- 
trality, will  she  best  fulfil  her  part  in  effecting 
that  democratic  and  spiritual  future  of  man- 
kind which  France,  her  republican  neighbour, 
pursues. 

Before  Switzerland  at  last,  before  Europe 
and  America,  there  are  but  two  alternatives. 
One  is  surrender  to  Prussia,  and  the  other  is 
the  extinction  of  Prussianism.  The  failure  to 
wrest  from  Prussia  her  sword  will  result  in  the 


66  THE   MENACE  OF  PEACE 

swift  and  certain  establishment  of  that  sword's 
universal  hegemony.  And  once  the  hegemony 
is  established,  it  will  be  followed  by  so  swift  a 
stultification  of  the  race,  by  a  descent  so  deep, 
a  darkness  so  abysmal,  that  the  best  human 
gains  which  the  centuries  have  achieved  will  be 
wiped  out  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye. 


XIII 

IN  an  hour  so  solemn  and  stupendous,  so 
fraught  and  so  swift,  there  is  no  place  for 
compromise,  there  is  no  time  for  neutrals.  In 
such  a  crisis  of  the  world,  neutrality  is  hy- 
pocrisy or  delusion.  Whatever  else  He  is  or 
is  not,  God  is  not  a  neutral.  The  God  of  the 
Christ  takes  sides,  and  takes  sides  terribly  and 
constantly.  Nor  Christ  nor  Socrates  went  to 
death  for  lack  of  convictions.  Whatever  we 
pretend  to  ourselves  or  to  others,  we,  too,  take 
sides:  if  we  are  not  with  Belgium  and  Serbia, 
with  France  and  England,  we  are  then  with 
the  German  and  the  Turk.  When  the  souls  of 
men  are  balanced  against  each  other  by  such 
a  conflict,  there  is  no  escape  from  making 
choice.  Humanity's  days  of  judgment  recog- 
nize no  neutrals.  And  there  are  none  in  fact. 
What  passes  for  neutrality,  if  it  is  not  a  covert 

67 


68  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

treason  to  the  right,  is  always  an  evasion, 
springing  from  self-deception  or  cowardice;  it 
is  always  a  moral  incapacity,  a  spiritual  sick- 
liness. In  a  war  between  good  and  evil,  the 
failure  to  discern  and  support  the  good  is  an 
essential  choice  of  the  evil.  Confounding  as 
they  do  the  crisis,  confusing  as  they  do  the 
issue,  and  mixing  the  light  and  the  darkness  in 
one  grey  dusk  of  doubt  and  indecision,  the 
neutrals  but  prevent  the  truth  from  appearing, 
the  good  from  defining  itself ;  and  thus  are  they 
the  falsehood's  effectual  and  favoured  friends. 
For  it  is  always  to  the  interest  of  the  lie  to  have 
a  region  of  confusion  between  itself  and  the 
truth;  while  it  is  alwaj^s  to  the  interest  of  the 
truth  to  come  directly  to  grips  with  the  lie.  So 
if  you  have  doubts  as  to  the  right  or  the  wrong 
of  any  given  crisis,  you  have  but  to  observe 
whence  the  neutrals  receive  their  protection  and 
applause.  You  may  be  sure  that  it  is  always 
the  false  or  evil  cause  to  which  the  neutrals  are 
dear  and  necessary. 

Thus,  and  with  perfect  logic,  it  is  from  Ger- 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  69 

many  the  neutrals  and  pacifists  receive  their 
inspiration  and  approbation,  while  it  is  the 
Alhes  who  will  have  none  of  them  or  their 
proposals.  It  is  pacifist  France,  it  is  slow- 
moving  England,  that  insists  the  war  must 
continue  till  its  issues  are  defined,  till  a  definite 
decision  is  reached.  It  is  militarist  Prussia 
that  sustains  or  sends  forth  the  peace-making 
emissaries  now  beclamouring  the  world.  It 
ought  to  be  apparent  to  the  blind  that  the  paci- 
fists are  workers  in  effect  for  Prussia,  and  the 
actual  enemies  of  France  and  England.  I 
have  met  nor  neutrals  nor  pacifists — and  I  have 
met  them  by  the  hundreds — who  were  not  se- 
cretly hoping  or  working  for  a  German  victory. 
Ostensible  peace-makers  they  are:  but  it  is 
practically  a  German  peace  they  pursue — a 
peace  that  will  leave  Germany  undefeated,  if 
not  immediately  victorious,  and  in  a  position 
to  equip  and  the  better  effectuate  her  will  to 
subdue  and  rule  mankind. 


XIV 

/T  is  for  just  such  a  veiled  and  invidious  vic- 
tory the  whole  of  the  genius  that  is  Prus- 
sian now  works.  Since  the  immediate  triumph 
of  her  arms  seems  impossible,,  if  she  may  con- 
clude the  war  as  a  draw,  if  she  may  darken  the 
mind  of  the  world  as  to  its  meaning,  then  Ger- 
many mjDLy  yet  turn  her  momentary  military 
failure  into  an  unexampled  historical  triumph. 
For  a  peace  that  leaves  Germany  undefeated 
is  essentially  a  German  victory,  and  straight- 
way leads  to  the  Germanization  of  the  world, 
A  peace  hased  upon  a  drawn  battle  between  the 
Germanic  Powers  and  the  Allies  is  nothing 
else  than  the  capitulation  of  the  world  to  Prus- 
sian might  and  mastery.  And  it  would  not 
only  be  a  German  triumph  that  such  a  peace 
would  procure,  but  a  triumph  immeasurably 
more  terrible,  in  its  full  and  final  results,  than 

70 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  71 

Germany  could  have  won  by  force  of  arms, 
even  had  they  been  successful.  For  such  a 
peace  could  issue  only  from  a  veritable  fall  of 
man.  The  world  would  have  refused  its  hour 
of  great  decision,  and  would  sink  into  universal 
apathy  and  docility  under  the  Prussian  rule 
and  discipline.  It  would  inevitably  be  so,  for 
the  refusal  to  decide  is  always,  in  effect,  a  de- 
cision for  the  downward  way. 


XV 

/'^R,  we  may  ask,  does  the  present  spiritual 
^^  condition  of  the  world  require  new  ages 
of  darkness?  Is  the  Prussian  way  inevitable? 
Does  the  undeveloped  or  irresponsible  soul  of 
the  world  require  this  discipline?  Was  the 
former  Romanization  of  the  world  necessary? 
I  know  that  great  issues  may  grow  and  mature 
under  the  shelter  of  the  blackest  human  night, 
or  amidst  the  wildest  human  wanderings.  But 
must  we  always  choose  the  way  of  the  wilder- 
ness, with  the  Promised  Land  plainly  in  view? 
We  must  decide  soon;  for,  make  no  mistake 
about  it,  the  danger  of  the  Germanization  of 
the  world  was  never  so  gi^eat  as  now.  Even 
to-day,  while  the  body  of  humanity  bleeds  from 
the  desperate  wounds  inflicted  thereupon  by 
the  unique  and  unbelievable  German  savagery 
— even  now  is  Germany,  by  her  extraordinary 

72 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  73 

capacity  for  a  persistent  and  concentrated  du- 
plicity, by  her  insidious  and  coercive  intellec- 
tual brutality,  by  her  superior  power  to  bemaze 
and  corrupt  the  mind  of  the  world — even  thus 
and  now,  is  Germany  winning  a  psychic  victory 
over  the  nations.  Behind  the  backs  of  the 
peoples,  a  peace  is  being  prepared,  or  prepared 
for,  that  will  leave  Germany,  though  not  ap- 
parently victorious,  yet  practically  stronger 
than  she  was  before  the  war.  Germanv  is  to- 
day  in  substantial  possession  of  Middle  Eu- 
rope, and  of  the  road  to  Asia  Minor.  Even  in 
military  defeat,  if  peace  comes  soon,  she  will 
have  largely  accomplished  her  ends;  and,  ten 
or  twenty  years  hence,  Europe  will  be  under 
her  rule.  She  will  have  adopted  a  pseudo-so- 
cialism that  will  in  reality  be  such  an  organiza- 
tion of  capitalism  as  no  Socialist  prophet  ever 
dreamed  of.  With  France  exhausted,  with 
England  unable  to  act  upon  the  Continent, 
with  Russia  and  Italy  and  the  Balkans  already 
in  the  German  grasp,  there  would  be,  in  a 
very  few  years,  a  Germanized  and  capitalized 


74  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

Europe  that  would  postpone  the  day  of  the 
democratic  and  co-operative  society  to  an  in- 
definite and  costly  future. 


XVI 

THEN,  working  with  Germany  for  a  peace 
in  her  favour,  are  two  great  international 
interests  that  are  powerful  enough,  if  their 
workings  are  not  discerned  and  thwarted,  to 
shape  the  course  of  the  nations.  One  is  the 
capital  that  has  been  so  largely  invested  in  the 
manufacture  of  munitions  and  the  machinery 
of  war;  the  other  is  the  Roman  Catholic  Hier- 
archy. 

It  seems  incredible  and  paradoxical  to  say 
that  American  munition-makers  who  are  sup- 
plying the  Allies,  and  who  formerly  and  self- 
ishly favoured  them,  are  now  desirous  of  a 
peace  that  shall  as  nearly  as  possible  restore 
the  European  status  existing  before  the  war. 
But  incredible  as  the  statement  is,  it  is  no 
less  true ;  and  if  we  analyse  the  peace  that  would 
be  based  upon  the  preservation  of  the  Ger- 
manic Powers,  and  if  we  compare  it  with  a 

75 


76  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

peace  based  upon  the  victory  of  the  Allies,  the 
fact  is  not  paradoxical.  It  is,  indeed,  wholly 
logical  that  munition-makers  in  particular,  and 
the  international  financial  monopoly  in  general, 
should  desire  to  arrest  the  war  before  it  ends 
in  a  conclusive  German  defeat.  For  the  ex- 
tinction of  the  Prussian  governmental  and  mili- 
tary system  will  undoubtedly  be  followed  by 
the  extinction  of  militarism  in  Europe;  and 
the  extinction  of  militarism  in  Europe  means 
the  extinction  of  the  profits — possibly  the  prin- 
cipal— of  the  billions  invested  in  the  manufac- 
ture of  equipments  of  war,  and  in  the  con- 
tinuity of  colossal  public  debts. 

For  the  armament-makers  of  the  world  are 
also  its  war-makers ;  and  the  greater  the  wars, 
the  greater  their  harvests.  But  they  look  not 
only  to  immediate  but  to  future  gains.  It  is 
to  their  interests  to  conclude  any  given  war  at 
such  a  time  and  in  such  a  manner  as  to  make  it 
the  seed  of  future  wars.  A  condition  of  in- 
ternational peace,  wherein  the  disputes  of  na- 
tions are  settled  before  an  authoritative  tri- 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  77 

bunal,  would  deprive  the  munition-makers  of 
their  markets,  and  expose  to  the  world  the  per- 
fidious power  of  the  international  dealers  in  na- 
tional debts. 

Now  it  is  certain  that  the  national  mind  of 
each  of  the  Allied  Powers  is  increasingly  de- 
termined this  war  shall  be  the  last.  Soldiers 
of  France  and  England  intend  that  the  like  of 
this  catastrophe  shall  never  again  come  to  the 
children  of  men.  If  there  are  vast  capitalist 
interests  and  professional  militarists  that  speak 
to  the  contrary,  the  time  is  nevertheless  near 
when  these  will  no  longer  be  heard;  soon  will 
they  have  played  their  final  part  in  the  admin- 
istration of  society.  If  the  citizen-soldiers  of 
the  Allied  Nations  make  up  their  minds  that 
this  war  shall  be  the  last,  the  last  it  will  be. 

But,  as  I  have  said  and  must  say,  the 
achievement  of  such  a  Messianic  end  depends 
upon  the  extinction  of  the  Prussian  system.  I 
believe  I  am  safe  in  predicting  that  the  victory 
of  the  Allies  will  lead  to  the  banishment  of  war 
from  our  planet.     But  if  Germany  remains 


g 


sy 


78  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

armed,  the  rest  of  the  world  must  remain 
armed  also,  and  the  armaments  increase  in- 
stead of  decrease.  A  defeated  Germany  is  the 
only  condition  of  universal  peace.  A  peace 
that  left  Germany  with  her  weapons  in  her 
hands  would  be  no  peace,  but  a  preparation 
for  wars  immeasurably  more  terrible  than  the 
one  that  now  baffles  our  hopes  for  humanity. 
Gernaany  would  soon  be  ready  to  fight  more 
advantageously  than  she  is  fighting  now;  and, 
against  the  gi^eater  German  menace,  England 
and  France  would  be  obliged  to  maintain  the 
large  conscriptive  armies  their  peoples  detest. 
Thus  it  is  easily  understandable  that  the 
American  capitalism  which  was  a  year  ago  on 
the  side  of  the  Allies  is  now  changing  to  the 
side  of  Germany.  It  is  logical  that,  at  this 
moment,  when  the  Allies  are  hopeful  of 
victory,  the  munition-makers  should  become 
peace-makers.  It  is  to  their  interest  to  make 
an  early  and  impermanent  peace,  based  upon 
the  presumption  that  the  war  is  a  draw,  in 
order  that  an  armed  and  unrepentant  Germany 


THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE  79 

may  provide  them  with  further  world-harvest. 
It  is  also  a  low  and  reacting  self-interest  that 
aligns  the  Catholic  Hierarchy  with  the  Ger- 
man side.  There  is  an  midoubted  though  un- 
written understanding  between  the  Central 
Powers  and  the  Vatican  that  the  defeat  of 
Italy  and  their  own  triumph  may  lead  to  a  res- 
toration of  the  papal  monarchy.  For  this  are 
Pope  Benedict  and  his  cabinet  bargaining  away 
their  supreme  and  unreturning  opportunity. 
Not  in  centuries  has  a  Pope  had  so  golden  and 
commanding  a  chance  as  was  offered  by  the  in- 
vasion of  Belgium  and  Serbia.  If  the  voice 
of  the  Church  had  then  been  heard  upon  the 
side  of  justice;  if  *'the  Rector  of  the  Globe," 
the  "Viceroy  of  God,"  had  then  lifted  up  the 
cross  in  defence  of  the  small  and  invaded  na- 
tions; if  he  had  then  denounced  the  strong 
Powers  that  trampled  the  weak,  that  violated 
sacred  and  protective  treaties,  and  that  well- 
nigh  destroyed  the  faith  of  mankind;  then  the 
Church,  thus  proving  its  possession  of  a  spir- 
itual authority,  would  also  have  earned  a  right 


80  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

to  counsel  the  nations.  But,  alas!  "the  Shep- 
herd of  the  Peoples"  sold  his  unquestioned 
birthright  for  a  miserable  pottage;  and  even 
his  pottage  shall  he  lose  in  the  end.  The  Vat- 
ican, which  might  have  become  the  throne  of 
an  unprecedented  moral  splendour,  became 
the  kennel  of  an  unexampled  cowardice.  And 
this  betrayal  of  Christ  and  His  peoples  by  the 
Church  continues  and  increases.  By  many  lab- 
yrinthine methods  the  Roman  Hierarchy  is 
working  for  a  German  peace ;  and  the  collateral 
restoration  of  the  temporal  power  is  in  the  air 
as  it  has  not  been  since  the  liberation  and  union 
of  Italy. 

Recently  and  mysteriously  there  came  to 
Switzerland  from  Berlin  a  member  of  the  so- 
called  Stockholm  Congress  of  Neutrals. 
Though  he  came  as  a  professional  pacifist,  yet 
always  he  let  it  be  known  that  he  considered 
Germany  really  victorious,  and  that  the  neutral 
nations  ought  to  compel  an  instant  peace  upon 
that  basis.  It  would  end  the  useless  flow  of 
blood — which  Germany  so  deeply  deplored,  and 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  81 

for  which  the  stubborn  Allies  were  responsible. 
He  sympathized  deeply  with  the  misunder- 
stood Germans,  and  explained  how  foolishly 
the  Belgians  had  acted  in  resisting  the  German 
invasion  of  their  country.  To  his  mental  proc- 
esses, Germany  was  the  martyr-nation,  and  the 
Belgians  an  obdurate  people  who  had  brought 
just  punishment  upon  themselves.  This  paci- 
fist is  also  a  writer  of  signed  editorials  for  an 
important  and  influential  syndicate  of  Ameri- 
can newspapers.  He  returned  to  Berlin, 
where  he  has  since  resided,  and  where  he  is  now 
engaged  in  writing  editorials,  not  only  in  fa- 
vour of  Germany,  but  also  suggestive  of  the 
restoration  of  some  form  of  temporal  power 
to  the  Pope.  This  last  he  conceives  to  be  a 
reasonable  solution  of  the  problem  of  the  Vat- 
ican. 

I  cite  this  example  because  it  is  typical.  In 
innumerable  instances — more  than  the  Allies 
are  aware  of,  more  than  even  Italy  is  aware  of 
— are  intrigues  for  some  form  of  papal  restora- 
tion filling  the  Western  world.    Ajid  it  is  pre- 


82  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

liminary  to  this  that  the  Catholic  Church  and 
its  governing  Jesuit  Order  are  working  for  a 
German  peace.  They  are  thereby  working  in 
their  own  behalf:  they  know  there  is  no  hope 
for  temporal  sovereignty  through  the  victory 
of  England  and  France:  in  the  victory  or  the 
preservation  of  the  Germanic  Powers  hes  the 
only  reasonable  papal  expectation. 

The  preservation  of  militarist  Germany — 
even  the  Land  of  Luther— is  now  a  papal  sine 
qua  non.  With  the  victory  of  the  Allies,  not 
only  is  the  dream  of  temporal  restoration  dis- 
solved, but  even  the  continued  papal  residence 
in  Italy  may  become  impracticable;  for  the 
wounds  which  the  intrigues  of  the  Vatican  have 
inflicted  upon  the  national  soul  of  Italy  are 
deep,  and  they  will  not  be  easily  healed.  But 
with  Germany  in  a  position  to  recover,  and 
with  the  Hapsburg  monarchy  still  in  existence, 
there  is  still  a  chance  that  the  phantom  of  a 
papal  kingdom  may  become  substantial. 

But  the  practical  alliance  of  the  Vatican 
with  Germany  is  based  not  only  on  the  hope 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  83 

of  temporal  power,  but  upon  the  desire  to  pre- 
serve the  autocratic  principle  as  the  social  basis. 
There  is  no  longer  any  doubt  that  the  victory 
of  the  Allies  will  be  followed  by  profound  and 
democratic  reconstructions.  English  soldiers 
are  saying:  "If  we  can  organize  so  well  for 
war,  we  can  also  organize  for  peace;  if  we  can 
have  such  communism  in  destruction,  we  can 
also  have  communism  in  production  and  dis- 
tribution." It  will  be  a  democratized  England 
that  appears,  and  that  within  a  short  space  of 
time,  when  her  victorious  soldiers  come  home. 
The  same  will  be  true  of  France,  and  vast 
changes  will  follow  in  Russia.  There  will  be 
quick  social  developments  in  Italy  also — the 
Italy  whose  king  is  in  deep  sympathy  with  the 
democratic  aspirations  and  economic  needs  of 
his  people. 

Now  the  Catholic  power  depends  upon  the 
subjection  of  the  peoples.  Every  democratic 
advance  is  an  undermining  of  the  authority  of 
the  Church.  It  is  therefore  consistent  that  the 
Vatican  should  seek  foT  a  peace  that  leaves  au- 


84  THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE 

tocratic  Germany  undiminished  in  power.  If 
autocracy  perishes  in  Germany,  it  will  speedily 
perish  from  the  world.  But  .if  a  peace  can  be 
made  that  is  favourable  to  Germany,  and  so 
made  as  to  conceal  the  real  meaning  of  the 
war,  then  not  only  in  Germany  is  the  autocratic 
principle  preserved:  it  is  likewise  preserved  in 
the  Catholic  Church.  Even  liberal  nations  will 
feel  impelled  toward  autocracy,  in  order  to 
maintain  the  military  efficiency  wherewith  to 
defend  themselves  against  the  renascent  Ger- 
man purpose. 

It  is  one  and  the  self -same  principle  that 
underlies  the  German  Empire,  the  papacy,  and 
the  international  financial  monopoly.  These 
three,  like  Pilate  and  Herod  and  Caiaphas, 
have  become  friends  in  the  day  of  the  cruci- 
fixion of  humanity — have  become  friends  in  the 
hope  that  they  may  prevent  humanity  from  ris- 
ing again. 


XVII 

BUT  the  most  menacing  of  these  is  Ger- 
many. Not  merely  the  mihtarism  of 
Germany:  for  that,  after  all,  might  be  sub- 
dued and  dissolved.  It  is  rather  the  whole  so- 
cial concept  of  the  German  collectivity,  the 
whole  attitude  of  that  collectivity  toward  other 
nations  or  collectivities,  the  whole  German  per- 
spective and  philosophy,  that  we  distrust  and 
combat.  The  present  German  mind  is  in  truth 
the  deadliest  enemy,  the  harshest  and  yet  sub- 
tlest seducer,  that  the  soul  of  the  world  has 
ever  had  to  meet. 

Few,  even  the  wisest  and  most  discerning, 
even  those  with  the  clearest  spiritual  vision, 
have  begun  to  apprehend  what  a  racial  devolu- 
tion would  ensue  the  laying  of  this  mind  upon 
Europe  and  America,  and  thence  upon  Asia. 
It  is  a  compelling  and  coercive  mind,  prevailing 
through    its    undoubting    self-confidence,    its 

85 


86  THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE 

unquestioning  assumption  of  the  inferiority  of 
all  other  minds  and  their  cultures,  and  its  ma- 
terial and  official  competence.  Even  through 
its  seeming  timidities  it  keeps  on  its  way,  con- 
quering by  its  unchanging  and  tortuous  per- 
sistence. Betimes  it  may  be  anxious  about  the 
opinion  of  the  world  concerning  its  concep- 
tions or  actions;  but  it  has  no  capacity  for 
questioning  the  utter  rightness  of  the  concep- 
tions and  actions  themselves.  It  never  occurs 
to  this  mind  that  there  is  a  possibility  of  its  be- 
ing wrong:  it  never  occurs  to  it  that  the  mind 
of  another  people  may  be  its  equal.  And,  not- 
withstanding its  technical  craft  and  compre- 
hensiveness, there  is  an  undefinable  moral 
vagueness  about  the  German  mind,  a  childish 
disregard  of  self-contradiction,  an  insensibility 
to  factual  truth,  that  is  banefully  attractive  to 
a  world  enfeebled — as  our  world  now  is — by 
material  absorption,  by  social  inconsequence 
and  futility. 

The  German  mentality  invites  mankind  into 
a  sphere  of  both  physical  comfort  and  spiritual 


THE  MENACE  OF  PEACE  87 

irresponsibility.  There  would  be  ample  eating 
and  drinking  therein,  and  a  common  freedom 
from  material  stress,  from  economic  doubt, 
from  personal  care.  It  would  be  a  world  en- 
circled by  pleasant  and  endlessly  ruminative 
clouds,  and  filled  with  the  soothing  toxins  of  a 
profound  intellectual  miasma.  A  strangely 
paradoxical  world  it  would  be — a  world  in 
which  the  ruthlessly  hard  and  the  degradingly 
soft  would  be  blended;  a  world  ensphered  in  a 
devouring  death  that  would  seem,  for  awhile, 
to  be  the  very  triumph  of  life.  It  would  in- 
deed be  a  world  that  stood  against  all  that  the 
prophets,  of  whatever  time  or  clime,  have  con- 
ceived to  be  the  purpose  of  God  or  the  mean- 
ing of  man. 


XVIII 

SAY  not  we  are  the  enemies  of  the  Ger- 
man race  who  thus  speak.  Not  we  but 
themselves  are  the  real  enemies  of  the  German 
peoples.  We  stand  against  that  for  which 
Germany  fights;  we  are  against  the  Prussian 
idea,  against  its  power  over  Germany,  against 
its  purpose  to  conquer;  but  for  the  German 
peoples  we  wish  only  well.  It  is  for  their  free- 
dom as  well  as  for  ours  we  contend,  and  contend 
with  pain  in  our  hearts.  Germany's  true  lovers 
are  they  who  now  stand  against  her — they  who 
make  war  upon  the  lie  that  enslaves  and  slays 
her  soul.  The  France  that  Germany  has  in- 
vaded is  sacrificing  her  sons  for  Germany  as 
well  as  for  herself.  There  are  Germans — ^yes, 
there  are  thousands  of  understanding  Germans 
— ^who  are  to-day  praying  for  Germany's  de- 
feat as  her  only  hope  of  salvation.    As  Ed- 

88 


THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE  89 

ward  Bernstein  has  recently  said,  "unless  the 
war  ends  for  Germany  in  definite  defeat,"  her 
middle-class  parties  will,  "by  hook  or  crook," 
maintain  her  existing  militarism.  And  the 
maintenance  of  German  militarism  means  the 
eventual  madness  of  mankind. 


XIX 

LET  us  never  forget  that  Germanism  is, 
above  and  before  all,  a  religion;  and  that 
it  is  the  rare  German  who  is  not  this  religion's 
unscrupulous  and  sleepless  priest.  And  not 
only  is  Germanism  a  religion,  with  its  altars 
dedicate  to  material  might,  with  its  worship  of 
the  will  to  power,  with  its  rituals  of  blood  and 
iron :  it  is  a  renaissance  of  all  the  ancient  gods 
and  worships,  of  all  the  wills  and  weapons,  that 
war  against  the  central  conception  of  Christ. 
Germanism  is  the  antagonist  and  the  exact  an- 
tithesis of  Christianism.  It  is  a  kind  of  uni- 
versal spiritual  chemicalization — a  precipita- 
tion, throughout  the  whole  body  of  humanity, 
of  the  evil  elements  of  evolution.  The  ani- 
malistic forces  of  history,  darkly  and  tremen- 
dously quickened,  are  re-rising  in  Prussian 
polity  and  practice,  and  thence  permeating  and 
poisoning  all  peoples,  even  to  the  rims  and 

90 


THE  MENACE   OF   PEACE  91 

edges  of  the  world.  The  gods  we  long  thought 
dead — ^the  gods  of  the  prehistoric  human  night, 
the  gods  of  the  dusk  before  the  dawn,  the  gods 
of  the  forest  tribes  and  the  pagan  cities — are 
all  back  upon  their  thrones,  confederate  in  a 
Prussian  resurrection,  and  striving  against  the 
light  that  would  release  the  Christ  from  his 
institutional  tomb;  striving  to  repeal  and  to 
surpass  the  law  and  leadership,  the  common 
justice  and  the  social  joy,  that  inhere  in  the 
application  of  his  love  to  the  totality  of  life 
and  labour.  They  are  all  here,  these  old  and 
terrible  gods — these  mental  shapes  of  natural 
force  and  primitive  fear;  and  the  magic  and 
the  mysteries  performed  by  their  priests,  they 
are  here  also,  renewed  and  monstrously  sub- 
limed, stupendously  and  definitely  determined, 
in  the  Germanism  of  yesterday  and  to-day  and 
to-morrow. 


XX 

LEST  now  the  reader  should  think  I  have 
over-stated  the  sense  of  super-humanity 
which  the  German  avows,  and  which  his 
teachers  cultivate,  let  me  quote  a  few  typical 
sentences  from  the  teachers  themselves/  Says 
Professor  Eucken,  the  German  philosopher  of 
things  spiritual,  and  greatly  influencing  the 
English  religious  philosophy  of  recent  years: 
"To  us,  more  than  to  any  other  nation,  is  en- 
trusted the  true  structure  of  human  existence." 
Said  Fichte  to  the  Germans  of  his  day:  "It 
is  you,  among  all  modern  nations,  that  have  in 
special  measure  received  into  your  keeping  the 
seeds  of  human  perfection."  Says  Dr.  Las- 
son  to  the  Germans  of  to-day:  "We  are 
morally  and  intellectually  superior,  beyond  all 
comparison,  as  to  our  organization  and  insti- 

1  For  the  translations  which  follow,  the  writer  is  indebted 
to  an  article  entitled  "The  Philosophy  of  Terrorism,"  in  the 
October  number  of  the  Unpopular  Review  of  New  York. 

92 


THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE  93 

tutions."  Professor  von  Stengel  of  Munich 
avows,  at  the  end  of  the  second  year  of  the 
war:  *'The  nations,  and  especially  the  neu- 
tral nations,  have  only  one  means  of  leading  a 
profitable  existence.  It  is  to  submit  to  our 
guidance,  which  is  superior  from  every  point 
of  view.  .  .  .  For  we  not  only  have  the  power 
and  force  necessary  for  this  mission,  but  we 
also  possess  all  the  spiritual  gifts  to  the  high- 
est degree,  and  in  all  creation  it  is  we  who  con- 
stitute the  crown  of  civilization."  Nor  need 
we  be  surprised  at  hearing  Professor  Momm- 
sen  scoff  at  the  actions  and  ideals  of  self-sacri- 
fice by  which  Celtic  heroes  have  expressed  their 
devotion  to  their  peoples;  nor  marvel  at  Pro- 
fessor Paulsen's  declaration  to  the  students  of 
Berlin  that  "the  very  words  of  virtue  and  duty 
have  an  antiquated  sound  in  our  ears";  nor 
doubt  the  laugh  that  ran  round  the  hall  when 
he  used  the  phrase,  "Happiness  of  the  hu- 
man race" — "Gliickseligkeit  des  Menschen- 
geschlechts." 

The  mind  of  the  German  genus  which  was 


94  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

SO  abhorrent  to  Tacitus,  and  of  which  Dante 
wrote  with  so  great  a  disgust,  is  transcenden- 
talized  but  not  changed  in  the  German  phi- 
losopher or  historian  of  to-day.  And  does  the 
reader  remember  his  Heine  ?  Let  him  turn  once 
again  to  Heine's  warning  to  France,  sounded 
eighty  years  ago:  "The  scientific  philosopher 
(who  followed  Kant  and  Fichte)  is  to  be 
feared  on  account  of  his  connections  with  the 
primitive  forces  of  nature,  of  his  abiUty  to  evoke 
the  daemonic  powers  of  old  German  Pantheism, 
and  awaken  that  joy  in  fighting  which  we  find 
among  the  ancient  Germans,  and  which  fights 
neither  to  annihilate  nor  to  subdue,  but  solely 
for  the  pleasure  of  fighting.  Christianity — 
and  this  is  its  noblest  merit — has  somewhat 
tamed  this  brutal  German  joy  in  combat, 
though  unable  to  destroy  it ;  and  if  once  the  re- 
straining Talisman,  the  Cross,  goes  to  pieces 
.  .  .  then  will  the  old  stone  gods  raise  them- 
selves from  their  immemorial  rubbish-heaps  and 
rub  the  dust  of  a  thousand  years  from  their 
eyes,  and  Thor,  with  his  giant's  hammer,  will 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  95 

at  last  spring  forth  and  smash  the  Gothic 
cathedrals  to  bits.  When  you  neighbouring 
children  of  men,  you  French,  hear  the  tumult 
and  the  clash,  take  heed  to  yourselves  and  do 
not  try  to  mix  in  the  business  that  we  are  ac- 
complishing in  Germany.  ...  At  the  sound 
of  it  the  eagles  will  fall  dead  from  the  air,  and 
the  lions  in  the  farthest  desert  of  Africa  will 
droop  their  tails  and  creep  into  their  royal 
lairs.  A  drama  will  be  played  in  Germany 
which  will  make  the  French  Revolution  seem 
like  a  harmless  idvll.  .  .  .  You  have  more  to 
fear  from  a  free  Germany  than  from  the  entire 
Holy  Alliance  and  all  the  Croats  and  Cos- 
sacks put  together.  .  .  .  Let  what  will  happen 
in  Germany,  let  the  Crown  Prince  of  Prussia 
or  Doctor  Wirth  come  to  power,  keep  your- 
selves always  armed,  stay  quiet  at  your  posts, 
with  musket  on  arm." 


XXI 

HEINE'S  prophecy  has  been  more  than 
fulfilled.  Beyond  his  ken,  beyond  the 
ken  of  any  man  now  living,  are  the  accruing 
consequences  of  Germany's  assault  upon  civili- 
zation. The  German  has  wrought  not  only  un- 
reckonable  iTiin  upon  France:  he  has  brought 
the  whole  family  of  man  to  the  brink  of  millen- 
nial catastrophe  and  reversion.  We  are  thus  in 
the  midst  of  a  crisis  that  carries  in  its  issue  the 
world's  fundamental  reconstruction  or  its  pos- 
sible dissolution.  Humanity  halts  at  the  cross- 
roads of  history,  and  the  question  mark  of  God 
there  stands.  We  are  deciding,  whether  we 
will  or  no,  either  by  conscious  choice  or  by  eva- 
sion, the  destiny  of  the  race  for  long  centuries 
to  come.  It  is  not  possible  to  exaggerate,  it  is 
impossible  that  we  yet  comprehend  or  encom- 
pass, the  height  and  the  depth  and  the  reach 
of  the  question  now  before  us.     If  ever  there 

96 


THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE  97 

was  a  war  between  good  and  evil,  it  is  now. 
If  ever  hath  Ormazd  striven  against  Ahriman, 
it  is  in  the  conflict  between  the  Allies  and  the 
Germanic  Powers.  And  shall  it  be  with  the 
light  or  the  darkness  the  nations  soon  gather 
together?  According  as  the  answer  shall  be, 
so  shall  the  years  hence  turn  to  man's  true  be- 
ginning, or  to  his  dread  and  necessitated  end. 

The  faith  effected  by  a  mere  decision  as  to 
the  world-war's  meaning — if  the  decision  ac- 
cord with  the  cosmic  urge — if  it  come  from  the 
conscious  choice  of  the  world — this,  in  itself, 
will  be  a  tremendous  act  of  creation,  changing 
in  a  moment  the  course  of  history,  wheeling  the 
world  into  new  meridians,  pitching  the  progress 
of  man  upon  a  plane  that  shall  march  his  mind 
with  the  mind  of  God. 


I 


XXII 

T  may  be  that  it  will  take  us  long  to  learn 
the  lesson,  so  red  and  ineradicable,  which 
the  war  is  writing.  It  may  be  that  we  are  but 
having  the  overture,  and  that  the  real  drama  is 
yet  to  unfold.  To-morrow's  curtain  may  rise 
upon  scenes  that  will  make  the  tragedy  of  to- 
day seem  juvenile  and  joyful.  It  is  possible 
that,  through  a  false  and  evasive  peace,  this 
fy  war  will  prove  to  be  the  prelude  of  other  and 
vaster  wars ;  of  revolutions  aimless  and  every- 
where; of  a  common  anguish  and  misery  be- 
yond measure  and  imagination.  It  may  need 
to  be  so — may  need  to  be  so  because  of  the 
moral  indolence  now  restricting  and  stupefy- 
ing the  race.  It  is  not  only  that  now,  as  al- 
ways, the  good  are  dull-witted  and  doubtful, 
slow  of  sight  and  slothful  in  action,  while  evil 
is  eager  and  active  and  watchful — not  this  only. 
It  is  that  there  has  grown  up  in  the  modern 
world  a  strange  incapacity  of  soul,  a  paralysis 

98 


THE   MENACE   OF    PEACE  99 

of  power  to  think  forward.  We  have  lost  the 
courage  to  face  great  questions  openly  and 
definitely.  Candour  of  soul  and  frankness  of 
action,  and  most  of  the  true  spiritual  arts  and 
integrities,  seem  lost  amidst  the  dust  of  doubted 
or  deserted  conventions.  The  age  of  material 
bigness  has  produced  an  age  of  spiritual  little- 
ness. Through  application  to  detail  we  have 
dissolved  the  capacity  to  conceive  or  to  con- 
template a  human  totality. 

Or  it  is  possible  that  the  war  may  end,  sud- 
denly and  unexpectedly,  in  a  common  repent- 
ance of  the  nations.  The  Day  of  the  Lord 
may  come  as  a  thief  in  the  night,  and  the  peo- 
ples together  be  changed.  From  one  great 
emotion  of  mutual  sympathy,  the  purpose  that 
unites  the  peoples  may  be  born,  and  the  boun- 
daries between  nations  and  classes  melt  away, 
with  the  old  limitations  of  the  mind,  the  old 
frontiers  of  the  soul.  A  sudden  sword  of  light 
may  cleave  our  thick  mental  walls,  may  slay 
the  delusions  that  divide  us,  and  heaven  and 
earth  begin  to  mingle. 


100  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

Or  yet  from  the  German,  in  an  horn*  of 
apocalyptic  defeat,  the  uniting  word  may  go 
forth.  To  some  of  us  who  stand  sharp  against 
her  in  the  present  hour,  Germany  is  still  the 
land  of  emotional  resource  and  sacred  romance 
and  stored  spiritual  treasure.  We  still  drink 
deeply  her  wells  of  knowledge,  and  the  springs 
of  song  and  story  and  devotion  that  flow  from 
her  forests,  her  rivers,  and  her  ancient  towns. 
We  still  believe  in  her  godly  latencies,  her 
heartful  homes,  her  family  piety.  We  trust 
her  buried  but  not  dead  diviner  being  will  yet 
awake,  will  yet  arise.  And  it  may  be  that, 
when  the  Prussian  night  is  gone,  when  the  Ger- 
man mind  grows  sane,  then  the  great  spiritual 
renewal  which  the  world  awaits  will  spring 
from  German  soil. 

Let  us  pray  that,  if  the  victory  be  with  the 
Allies,  no  cry  for  revenge  will  profane  their 
lips.  Let  England  and  France,  let  Italy  and 
Russia,  let  Belgium  and  Serbia,  once  they  have 
won,  be  true  to  the  principle  emblazoned  upon 
their  banners.     They  may  level  and  plough  the 


/  JR^ 


-n^- 


^\*%  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE  101 

Krupp  acres,  if  they  will;  they  may  dismiss  the 
HohenzoLerns  and  the  Hapsburgs  from  the 
thrones  of  Europe ;  they  may  disarm  the  Prus- 
sian State  and  reduce  it  to  its  due  proportions ; 
but  let  them  then  also  disarm  themselves,  and 
leave  the  German  peoples  to  work  out  their 
own  redemption,  to  choose  their  own  future. 
Let  there  be  no  needless  humiliations,  no  tri- 
imiphal  entry  into  Berlin,  no  prolonged  occu- 
pation of  German  lands.  Let  the  action  of  the 
Allies  be  such  as  to  convince  the  German  na- 
tion that  its  fellowship  is  desired  in  a  new  and 
a  real  international  fraternity.  Let  the  civi- 
lization that  has  preserved  its  essential  values 
from  Prussian  destruction  convince  the  Ger- 
man peoples,  by  its  generous  justice  and  for- 
bearance, that  their  own  Prussian  masters  and 
none  others  have  been  their  enemies.  Thus  the 
deep  and  hid  springs  of  the  German  soul  may 
be  uncovered,  and  flow  for  the  world's  healing; 
and  the  victory  of  the  Allies  over  Germany 
may  thus  prove  to  be  a  victory  of  the  Divine 
Presence  in  man. 


XXIII 

BUT  whether  from  Germany  or  from 
France,  whether  from  the  East  or  the 
West,  and  whether  early  or  late,  from  some- 
where the  word  that  unites  the  world  must  go 
forth — or  the  world  cease  to  be.  By  the 
mouths  of  Cyclopean  cannons,  by  the  miles  and 
millions  of  the  dead,  by  the  wails  of  the  widows 
and  the  woes  of  the  children,  God  is  asking  if 
we  are  now  able  to  receive  such  a  word.  We 
shall  have  to  give  God  His  answer.  We  shall 
have  no  peace  till  we  do.  Nor  shall  we  then 
have  peace,  if  the  answer  be  not  on  the  side  of 
the  truth  that  is  in  Christ.  For  God  thinks,  I 
opine,  that  it  is  better  that  our  world  should 
perish  than  that  it  should  any  longer  believe 
and  build  upon  lies. 


102 


XXIV 

WE  should  not  have  to  wait.  The  answer 
is  due.  All  things  are  prepared.  For 
the  first  time,  the  eyes  of  the  world  are  cen- 
tred upon  a  single  stage.  For  two  years  we 
have  watched  a  world  drama  unfold,  and  have 
been  learning  to  think  in  world-terms.  When 
the  curtain  rings  down  upon  the  war  the  world- 
stage  will  remain,  the  eyes  of  mankind  still 
fixed  thereupon,  waiting  for  the  rise  of  the 
curtain  to  rise  upon  the  profounded  drama  to 
follow.  The  changes  that  succeed  the  war  will 
prove  so  much  more  dramatic,  so  much  more 
predestinating,  that  the  war's  wide  scenes  and 
sorrows,  immeasurable  and  consuming  as  they 
were,  will  seem  as  the  brutish  play  of  primitive 
children.  Be  sure  that,  if  a  true  and  final 
peace  prevails,  there  will  be  no  past.  Unless 
the  human  experiment  shall  totally  fail,  the 
world  will  never  go  back  to  its  former  divisive 

103 


104  THE  MENACE  OF   PEACE 

modes  and  manners.  In  one  way  or  another, 
humanity  will  have  begun  to  realize  itself  as 
one  organism,  of  which  nations  and  individuals 
are  inseparable  and  responsible  members. 


XXV 

ALL  of  us,  whether  sceptic  or  girt  with 
faith — or  all  of  us  who  think  and  care 
— conceive  that  our  human  pilgrimage  is  com- 
pelled, both  within  and  without,  towards  some 
spiritual  upland,  whereon  we  shall  strike  the 
unshadowed  ways,  and  proceed  harmoniously 
together.  We  somehow  and  hopefully  infer 
that  the  chief  factors  of  the  human  push,  of  the 
blind  and  bewildered  climb  of  man,  are  as  yet 
unseen  and  rarely  vocal.  There  are  hints  that 
our  confused  and  visible  history,  so  obscure  in 
its  causes  and  effects,  its  records  so  contradic- 
tory and  unreal,  be-shadows  a  history  that  is 
real  and  not  yet  revealed.  We  are  being  led 
onward,  we  believe,  even  though  we  but  guess 
the  goal,  but  glimpse  the  glory.  The  goal  and 
the  glory  are  there ;  unimaginable  breadth  and 
brightness  of  being  await  us,  somewhere  amidst 
the  clouded  heights  up  which  we  toil  so  hardly, 
so  haltingly.     Of  this  we  are  somehow  sure. 

105 


106  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

A  magnificence  of  hope  remains,  even  to  our 
mangled  world.  Probably  there  was  never  so 
much  faith  as  now — never  even  an  approach  to 
such  faith  as  now  bottoms  the  soul  of  each  na- 
tion. The  old  things  are  passing  away,  it  is 
true,  and  with  a  noise  and  a  sorrow  that  seem 
beyond  mortal  enduring,  while  the  pattern  of 
the  new  is  wrapped  in  a  strange  divine  reti- 
cence; nor  know  we  if  the  time  of  revealment 
be  to-day  or  to-morrow.  But  the  peoples  are 
filled  with  a  premonition,  unspoken  and  form- 
less yet,  that  some  vast  realization,  in  which  all 
humanity  is  to  share,  is  not  far  off.  Behind  the 
thunderous  Tartarian  night,  enrif ting  the  death 
and  the  dread  thereof,  and  striking  the  scales 
from  our  eyes  betimes,  gleam  the  streets  and 
the  fields  of  a  new  earth,  the  poise  and  the 
peace  of  a  heavenly  society.  These  cannot  be 
taken  by  violence ;  we  may  not  rudely  rend  the 
veil;  but  they  are  there,  and  they  are  ours. 
And  when  our  dragons  of  egoism  and  division 
are  slain,  the  flaming  ramparts  will  fall  away, 
and  the  City  of  God  be  our  home. 


XXVI 

AND  who  knows  if  this  world-war  be  not 
a  hinging  of  heavenly  gates?  None  of 
us  can  say,  but  each  of  us  may  decide  and  do ; 
nor  only  may  but  must.  For  now  the  one  un- 
pardonable sin,  the  most  vicious  of  all  delusions, 
is  the  attitude  of  detachment.  They  who  feel 
the  questions  of  the  war  too  gross  for  their  con- 
sideration, they  who  think  themselves  superior 
to  its  debates  and  battles,  they  who  imagine 
themselves  in  spiritual  altitudes  above  it  all 
— these  are  the  low  and  the  ignoble  of  to-day. 
Does  it  not  occur  to  them  that,  in  their  im- 
agined superiority,  they  are  making  themselves 
above  the  Christ  who  died  at  the  hands  of  both 
rulers  and  mobs?  Do  they  not  see  that  they 
are  exalting  themselves  above  God?  For 
whatever  God  is.  He  is  not  above  but  within 
the  war,  bearing  its  dirt  and  blood  and  bestial 
fury,  and  the  whole  of  its  pain  and  shame, 

107 


108  THE   MENACE  OF   PEACE 

Now,  as  always,  the  heart  of  God  beats  surest 
where  the  struggle  of  man  is  hardest,  where 
the  woe  is  wildest.  And  he  who  enters  the 
war's  encircling  hell  most  deeply  and  redemp- 
tively,  he  is  the  man  who  walks  and  works  with 
God;  he  is  the  one  whose  heart  is  highest, 
whose  soul  is  purest,  and  who  holds  humanity 
true  to  its  divine  election. 

It  is  better — a  thousand  times  better — to 
take  the  side  of  the  wrong  than  to  be  on  no 
side  at  all.  For  even  amidst  the  uttermost 
ranks  of  the  wrong  we  are  nearer  the  right 
than  such  as  consider  themselves  cloistered 
from  a  conflict  that  is  shattering  life's  former 
foundations. 


XXVII 

THEN  let  us  decide,  eacH  of  us  according 
as  seemeth  to  him  good.  If  to  you  Ger- 
many's cause  be  just,  then  with  Germany  take 
your  stand.  If  to  you  the  Alhes  are  fighting, 
albeit  blindly,  for  a  fairer  human  future,  for  a 
free  and  fraternal  world,  then  give  to  the  AlHes 
such  service  as  you  may. 

To  me  there  are  no  two  ways,  there  is  but 
one  way,  wherein  behevers  in  freedom  and  fra- 
ternity, or  they  who  hold  to  a  true  socialist 
faith,  or  the  followers  of  the  faith  that  was  in 
Christ,  may  consistently  walk.  Before  us, 
beckoning  along  that  way,  are  the  banners  of 
Alfred  of  England  and  Albert  of  Belgium. 
The  swords  of  Jeanne  d'Arc  and  St.  Louis  are 
there;  and  the  tread  of  the  Garibaldians  and 
the  first  French  Republicans ;  and  the  voices  of 
Milton  and  Mazzini  and  Lincoln;  and  the  vi- 
sions of  the  divine  Assisian  and  the  Patmos 
apostle. 

109 


110  THE   MENACE   OF   PEACE 

Ours  is  the  time  of  the  real  Crusades,  com- 
pared with  which  the  Crusades  of  old  were  but 
nursery  parades.  The  AlUes  are  fighting, 
though  they  know  it  not,  for  a  universal  rescue 
of  the  good  that  is  in  Christ.  The  Central 
Powers,  with  the  Bulgar  and  the  Turk,  are 
fighting  to  destroy  that  good,  and  to  supplant 
it  with  the  palaeolithic  good  of  Prussian  phi- 
losophy and  practice.  It  is  indeed  no  fantasy 
or  fanaticism  to  which  I  thus  give  utterance. 
It  is  for  no  less  than  the  enthronement  of  the 
anti- Christ  principle  that  Germany  has  made 
war  upon  humanity.  She  incarnates  and  she 
is,  in  her  divinization  of  physical  and  moral  vio- 
lence, the  veritable  anti-Christ  of  the  early 
Christian  seers.  Our  choice  is  between  Ger- 
manism and  Christ — ^that,  nor  else  than  pre- 
^  cisely  that  at  last,  is  the  matchless  meaning  of 
the  war;  and  the  choice  we  make  will  be  ir- 
revocable and  eternal. 


THE  END 


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940.91 
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COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARIES 


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DUE  DATE 

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